Review: The Dog Stars

There are few filmmakers who seem less interested in slowing down than Ridley Scott. At 88, the director is still cranking out movies at a pace that would exhaust someone half his age, bouncing between historical epics, science fiction, crime dramas and whatever else catches his attention. That restless curiosity has become part of the fun of late-period Scott. Even when the movies don't entirely work, there is usually something fascinating about watching one of cinema's great craftsmen decide that this is the story he needs to tell next.

Which makes The Dog Stars such a peculiar disappointment. Scott has finally made a post-apocalyptic survival movie, and somehow it feels like he's arrived after everyone else has already packed up and gone home.

Adapted from Peter Heller's 2012 novel, the film takes place years after a flu pandemic has wiped out most of humanity. Hig (Jacob Elordi) lives at an abandoned Colorado airfield with his dog Jasper and Bangley (Josh Brolin), a heavily armed survivalist whose approach to meeting strangers generally involves shooting first and skipping the questions altogether. Hig pilots a small Cessna on supply runs, occasionally helping a nearby Mennonite community while continuing to mourn the wife he lost during the pandemic. Then a faint radio transmission from somewhere near Grand Junction convinces him that there might be something, or someone, worth finding beyond the little world he and Bangley have constructed. You probably already know where some of this is going.

That's the problem. There was undoubtedly something fresher about Heller's premise when the novel arrived more than a decade ago, but The Dog Stars now lands in a culture thoroughly saturated with stories about pandemics, abandoned cities, suspicious survivors and rugged people searching for humanity after humanity has mostly disappeared. We've seen The Last of Us. We've seen Station Eleven. We've seen multiple versions of 28 Years Later. At this point, seeing nature reclaiming highways while a lonely man stares sadly toward the horizon doesn't carry the weight it once did.

Scott can still make it look awfully good, though. Working with cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, he gives the film a tactile beauty that occasionally suggests a better movie hiding somewhere inside this one. Hig's flights over the empty landscape are gorgeous, and Scott remains remarkably good at making physical spaces understandable. When violence erupts, you always know where people are, where the danger is coming from and exactly how badly things might go. One extended sequence involving Bangley defending their compound briefly wakes the entire movie up, reminding us that Scott can stage controlled chaos better than filmmakers several generations younger. Just look past the dodgy CGI at times.

Brolin helps. His Bangley is simultaneously funny, frightening and oddly endearing, a guy who prepared his whole life for the apocalypse only to discover that getting exactly what you wanted isn't necessarily much fun. Brolin understands the movie could use some personality and happily supplies it whenever he's around. Guy Pearce, appearing later as another suspicious survivor, brings a similarly welcome amount of texture to what could have been a stock character.

Elordi has the harder job. Hig is supposed to carry an enormous amount of grief beneath his quiet exterior, and Elordi certainly looks appropriately haunted, but the screenplay rarely gives him enough to turn that sadness into something specific. Too much of the character is expressed through melancholy staring and vague observations about everything humanity has lost.

Things improve slightly when Hig encounters Cima (Margaret Qualley), a widow living with her father at an isolated ranch. Qualley brings warmth and curiosity to the film, and there are lovely little moments between her and Elordi as two people cautiously remembering what companionship feels like. Unfortunately, the movie needs their relationship to become considerably more powerful than it ever does. Their shared grief should connect them, but because we know so little about the people they're grieving, the romance often feels like two attractive movie stars being sad together in beautiful locations.

That's indicative of the larger issue. The Dog Stars keeps brushing against interesting ideas without digging into any of them. Hig believes people need other people. Bangley believes people are precisely what you need protection from. That should create a compelling ideological tension about what rebuilding civilization might actually require. Instead, the film mostly abandons the question once Hig flies away.

Then the final act arrives and the movie suddenly becomes louder, stranger and considerably sillier, as if somebody wandered into the editing room carrying reels from an entirely different post-apocalyptic adventure. Scott handles the action with his customary confidence, but the tonal shift only emphasizes how uncertain everything before it has been. Shout out to Allison Janney for flying a freak flag high and proud here.

There is something touching buried beneath The Dog Stars: an old filmmaker looking toward the end and wondering whether surviving matters if you've got nobody left to survive for. Scott clearly responds to the story's stubborn belief that connection remains worthwhile even when the world has given you every reason to close yourself off. That's a worthwhile idea. It's just one that deserves a more interesting apocalypse.

2/5