Four-time Oscar-nominated director Ridley Scott isn’t just one of Hollywood’s most prolific blockbuster filmmakers. He’s the rare artist who knows how to visually paint on a big-screen canvas. His new film, The Dog Stars, reconfirms that reputation, its story embellished with striking aerial panoramas of the misty Colorado mountains that evoke both grand beauty and loneliness.
Unfortunately, no amount of aesthetic splendor can compensate for the derivativeness of the director’s latest, a post-apocalyptic yarn that’s stitched together from the decomposing parts of its genre ancestors. Headlined by a squandered Jacob Elordi, Margaret Qualley, Josh Brolin, and Guy Pearce, it has many stars and yet proves a mangy dog.
An adaptation of Peter Heller’s novel of the same name, The Dog Stars (August 28, in theaters) is the story of a grief-stricken loner in a virus-ravaged America who traverses decimated rural and urban landscapes while forlorn acoustic guitar cascades over the soundtrack. In other words, it’s The Last of Us, except in this case, the man in question is Hig (Elordi) and his regular traveling companion is his loyal dog, Jasper.
The two live at an abandoned airport with Bangley (Brolin), a former Marine, and survive on supplies they collect from downtown Denver—a ravaged, sparsely populated metropolis they reach via mechanic Hig’s Cessna plane.
Working from Mark L. Smith’s script, Scott establishes his conceit with his typical efficiency, allowing details about his characters and their situation to emerge from the action at hand. During an expedition to the city, Hig is attacked by a crossbow-wielding bum who warns him that a group of even worse scavengers are on the horizon, and in an act of mercy that speaks to his compassion, Hig lets him live.
That empathetic ethos doesn’t extend to Bangley, a hardened military veteran who’s comfortable shooting first and asking questions later, especially when interlopers appear on the borders of their abandoned-airport home.
Elordi and Brolin are as convincing as their roles will allow early on, but from the start, The Dog Stars imagines them as cardboard cut-out versions of prior survivalist-thriller protagonists. Whereas Bangley is resigned to their fate and convinced that staying put in their heavily fortified residence is the best way to remain alive (and something for which they should be grateful), Hig hasn’t let this big, bad, cruel world break his hopeful spirit.
When a surprise attack on their compound results in another tragedy for Hig—who, during his trips to Denver, stops by the house he once shared with his pregnant wife, whose ghost he “visits”—he decides to see if the grass is greener by ditching his comrade and flying to Grand Junction.
This is all by-the-books post-apocalyptic drama and only enlivened by the handsome shots of Hig’s Cessna soaring through the cloudy air, swerving between perilous peaks and, on occasion, gliding without the aid of its engine—incidents which indicate that Hig’s despair may be nearing suicidal levels.
Before anything that drastic can take place, however, the Cessna breaks down, forcing its pilot to make an emergency landing, after which he has a run-in with an animal stampede (a sequence neutered by unconvincing CGI) and stumbles upon a ranch where he meets Cima (Qualley) and her unwelcoming father Pops (Pearce).
The moment Cima enters the frame, it’s clear that she’s Hig’s second chance, and though he takes things slowly, he eventually ingratiates himself with Pops. As befitting the tale’s quiet-loud-quiet structure, their peaceful time together is short-lived, and The Dog Stars’ marauders are, to a tee, unidentified enemies who either resemble Native Americans or MS-13 members. Their indistinctness is part and parcel of a film that sketches everyone in no more than two dimensions.
Just as Hig and Bangley are defined by their professions and yin-yang dispositions, Cima is a medical student who, like Hig, lost her spouse during the viral pandemic, Pops is a rancher with a gruff streak a mile long, and the Mennonites whom Hig brings Sprite and medicine (led by Benedict Wong’s Aaron) are featureless plot devices.
Despite Scott’s adeptness at staging an interesting-looking shootout, The Dog Stars has zero imagination, and its narrative rides such familiar rails that there’s never any doubt about how its encounters will turn out. Consequently, the film is turgid, merely asking Elordi to brood and Brolin to grimace and seethe. Both are up to the task, and the two share a couple of funny exchanges, but there’s no life to their dynamic. Worse, there are no stakes to their saga—the byproduct of them being ciphers in a country whose undoing is never properly explicated and where food, medicine, and weaponry are in relative abundance.
Hig and company’s stopover in Grand Junction, a mysterious outpost with electricity and additional luxuries, is the sole sequence that hums with potential. Aside from giving Allison Janney an opportunity to chew scenery as an overly cheerful flight attendant, however, it doesn’t amount to more than a rote case of appearances being deceiving.
Even so, it’s superior to everything that ensues, given that Scott goes almost laughably soft in the film’s closing stanzas, not to mention cuts a couple of giant corners in order to reach his pat and unconvincing happily-ever-after.
At this point in his illustrious career, Scott can churn out a feature like The Dog Stars in his sleep. Yet the overarching question is, why did he want to when it boasted so little originality or room for invention? The film’s title references the Jasper-inspired constellations Hig stares at when he sleeps out in the open. But even that (seemingly central) element is cursorily handled, thereby imparting the impression that no one cared enough to bother treating any of the proceedings’ particulars seriously.
In a post-COVID-19 era, a tossed-off end-of-the-world affair has to deliver more than the vague cookie-cutter fantasy peddled by The Dog Stars. Scott’s formal craftsmanship, along with his cast’s innate charisma, ensures it’s rarely a wholesale snoozefest. Nonetheless, it’s his most lackluster offering in over a decade and suggests that, if slowing down isn’t an option (he is, after all, 88 years old), shrewder choices of future material are a must.
