Review: The Dog Stars is Watchable Yet Adds Nothing New

The thing about post-apocalyptic movies is that, so far, Earth has avoided living through any of the kind of apocalypses depicted. This enables filmmakers to come up with myriad ways to play out the events. However, almost all of these films include familiar tropes: the anxiety that leads to rage as resources dwindle, which then leads to poor choices and murderous intent.

In the same way that many films Christopher Nolan made before The Odyssey can be directly mapped onto that film, Ridley Scott has long enjoyed exploring the relationship between sci-fi events and human behaviour without actually examining a post-apocalyptic narrative. Until now.

The Dog Stars (based on Peter Heller’s book and screenplay) is the dictionary-definition of a post-apocalyptic film. Set in Denver, Colorado, in 2035, Jacob Elordi plays former mechanic Hig, living a safe dystopian life on an abandoned airfield with dog Jasper and ex-Marine Bangley (Josh Brolin). Hig can fly small planes, which helps with his periodic trips into the city and enables him to bring supplies to Benedict Wong‘s hidden Mennonite community. Life with the mercenary Bangley is getting Hig down, and he can’t escape his grief for his pregnant wife, who died from the mysterious virus that wiped out most of the world. When he hears a transmission on his plane comms coming from just beyond the mountains, Hig decides he is going to investigate; but his plane crashes on Pops’ (Guy Pearce) and daughter Cima’s (Margaret Qualley) rural farm before he can reach the transmission’s source.

Scott is a wonderfully scenic director. With smooth, dreamy shots, he creates and captures the vastness of worlds (see Blade Runner, Prometheus, Gladiator and countless other examples of his work). In The Dog Stars, he does the same, at least for the first half of the film, which acts as a love letter to simple living on our beautiful, green planet. But then Scott’s inner voice, that one telling him to focus on the inherently flawed and angry humanity, gets too loud to ignore, and the quiet desolation turns into rapidly escalating melodrama. Alas, every last one of those post-apocalyptic tropes is writ large in The Dog Stars. This turns the film into something rushed and inadvertently funny as characters go wildly off the rails, because Scott had not first established what ten years of dystopia may do to the populace as a whole. It looks like he read the book and assumed we all had too.

Elordi takes every twist and turn on the chin, moodily waving a military rifle while pouting at his misfortune. Which is also funny because Hig is the luckiest SOB in this dystopia. Brolin gets to have more fun and enjoys the movie for what it is. Unfortunately, Scott never quite elevates Qualley’s role, as this is one man and his dog’s story.

Go for Scott, stay for the lunacy and leave thinking The Dog Stars is a middle-of-the-road movie. Let’s hope that if Scott continues, his next film is about the C-beams glittering near the Tannhäuser gate. Now that would be a new story worth telling.

The Dog Stars hits cinemas on 26th August.