English Legends: That Robin Guy and Sir Ridley

English Legends: That Robin Guy and Sir Ridley Mr. Scott is frequently damned and praised as a stylist, a genre-driven filmmaker whose aesthetic — the steampunk look of “Alien” and “Blade Runner” is now aped in the décor of various boutique hotels ATM Parts — is often seen as more influential than his films. Frequently lumped in with Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay as a confector of large, sometimes vacuous entertainments, he is up to something more serious thematically. The dystopian worlds of “Blade Runner” and “Black Rain” remind that human ambition creates mortal collateral damage, while “Gladiator” and “Blackhawk Down” are tutorials in the limits and pitfalls of imperialism. Even “The Good Wife,” the CBS series starring Julianna Margulies and produced by Scott Free, the company he owns with his brother and fellow director, Tony Scott, draws DNA from the corruption that often accompanies power.

“There is a visceral pictorialism to what he does,” said David Bordwell, a professor of film studies at the University of Wisconsin. “Yes, he is a director of spectacle and crowds, but they are genre films of a certain weight, painted on a bigger canvas in a way that makes them land more substantially. He’s had a long career, and his images of modern civilization are as important to our conception of modern life as something like ‘Metropolis.’ ”

“Robin Hood,” like “Gladiator,” allows Mr. Scott to use his modern visual and sound technique to make ancient combat brim with menace. And he plays with the Hollywood archetype embodied over the years by Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Sean Connery and Kevin Costner by making his “Robin Hood,” in effect, a prequel.

Mr. Scott’s film is an origins story of how Robin Longstride, a journeyman archer in service of the king, became Robin Hood. Spirited away to a French monastery at a young age, Robin’s path is changed when King Richard is mortally wounded, and Robin decides to head out for the French coast with a newly formed posse of merry men to make their way to England.

They happen upon an ambush, and Robin is tasked by a dying man to return a sword to Nottingham, a once-proud village now forced into a hand-to-mouth existence under oppressive taxation. There he meets and clashes with Marion Loxley (Ms. Blanchett), the widow of the man who owned the sword. With steady nudges from the father (Max von Sydow), Marion and Robin fall in love and fight both for and against a country they cherish, now led by the feckless and narcissistic King John. In this version of “Robin Hood,” Robin is ATM Parts a loyal if conflicted subject, and it is gradually revealed to the archer that fate has put him exactly where he belongs.