The Dog Stars releases in theaters August 28.
Ridley Scott is hardly a novice when it comes to depicting determined men (and occasionally women) shouldering various degrees of emotional repression while doing whatever it takes to survive in hostile spaces. Really, take your pick from a career that spans nearly 50 years. More often than not, his films resonate — he’s earned the right to call himself an “influencer,” however ridiculous the quote. But his latest, The Dog Stars, which has seemed to catch the general public flat-footed, is a miss that’s too many steps removed from its emotional center to find any fresh truth in the crowded post-apocalyptic survival genre.
The Dog Stars, based on the 2012 Peter Heller novel, is not necessarily the tense action-thriller about a man (Jacob Elordi), his dog, and the unlikely ratio of hot people fighting to stay alive in a lawless, overgrown dystopia that the trailer makes it out to be. Instead, it’s largely a slow-moving survival story set years after a strange virus decimates society, leaving behind said hot people to grieve while a whole other subset of remaining people seemingly loses their minds, banding together to become violently deranged hordes who live to loot from those who are trying to keep a peaceful existence. Requisite lonesome acoustic guitar soundtrack straight from The Last of Us included, of course, along with a few other baffling country music needle drops.
The first 20 minutes alone are an extended side quest following Elordi’s mechanic Hig and his good boy Jasper on a supply run, loping through an abandoned Denver for Coca Cola products and medical supplies amid unquestionably gorgeous wide shots of the city. Hig flies through Rocky Mountain forests in his tiny yellow prop jet, his signature move being to kill the engine and just coast above it all with Jasper in the co-pilot seat, listening for a radio signal from a place called Grand Junction that’s rumored to harbor the last vestiges of civilization. It’s perfectly suited for IMAX, which is how I saw The Dog Stars. But these recurring vistas feel like excuses to shoot this for the premium screen experience using the nature cheat code, despite this being a film that would have otherwise crushed on streaming, where people aren’t captive audiences and might not be forced to feel too deeply or think about basic world-building questions, such as: What’s the deal with this mysterious killer flu anyway? How did those looters turn so feral? How does Hig still have a full supply of coffee beans (and does he have French Roast)?
It’s not entirely that this movie is patently uninterested in the society that came before, but it is more focused on how those who remain cope with the present, content to reminisce over their past lives in dull conversations. When Hig returns from his supply run to the homestead he shares with Josh Brolin’s hardened (and occasionally funny) ex-Marine Bangley, the two quibble over being happy with what they have and how best to lock down their property from the threat of the looters they call Reapers that need to be “dealt with like roaches.” (Bristling bros, very hot right now!) Hig journeys out and finds his way to the father-daughter duo Jack (Guy Pearce, also doing an occasionally funny grumbly paranoid dad) and Cima (a perfectly serviceable Margaret Qualley). As they pull up tree stumps and sit under the stars together, Cima and Hig talk about their dead spouses. Hig flirts with her by talking about… golf. The Dog Stars script, written by Mark L. Smith, is the film’s dead weight, full of leaden dialogue that’s fine in a novel and sounds wildly contrived coming out of a real person’s mouth.
After a sleepy first hour, things pick up with coinciding standoffs of our central characters — Hig, Cima, and Jack in their neck of the woods, Bangley holding down his compound — vs. the Reapers, where we finally get a taste of the guns-blazing action promised in the trailer. In a stylish first-person sequence, Bangley, going full military ops mode, dons a night vision monocular that turns people into smearing neon green and their blood into proverbial paintball splatter. Hig and co. need to outrun a reaper pincer maneuver that ends with the first shock-laugh of the movie. These moments are, as you’d expect, exciting and well-directed, but the question of what are the intruders even doing hangs over these scenes. I don’t need every single character motivation explained — abstraction can be great! — but the lack of anything beyond “these are the bad guys consumed by inscrutable runes” who are depicted as whooping shirtless tattooed fiends is, speaking generously, not from this era of filmmaking. All of this does lead to a wild third-act shift that has some verve when the Hig trio reaches Grand Junction, headlined by Allison Janney doing the most capital-A acting of the whole movie in a ‘50s stewardess getup.
I can’t discuss a movie called The Dog Stars without talking more about Jasper the dog. As in any movie with a trusty companion, I brace myself for whatever may come, hoping for the best yet expecting emotional terrorism. But, like every other connection in this movie, even man’s best pal is kept at a somewhat icy emotional distance. For all the jostling to reckon with the sheer amount of societal loss, it all ends up feeling like something to shrug off — even the stuff with the dog. Oh well, at least we have The Sheep Detectives.
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