Ridley Scott seems to believe that enough self-aggrandising about his own recent filmography can convince audiences that these are good movies. This delusion has caused nothing but diminishing returns for his catalogue the past decade – House of Gucci, Gladiator II, and the notably laborious Napoleon – with Ridley getting particularly good at wasting a big cast and an even bigger budget.
With the exception of The Last Duel, Scott’s latest post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama, The Dog Stars, joins the ranks of these other forgettable and misguided misfires of the 2020s. For a film about a grieving pilot who attempts to survive a virus-ridden world, Scott has never felt more directorially on autopilot. With thin characterisations, a glacial pace, and an equally generic and glum plot, not even impressive aerial photography can make this film feel even remotely memorable.
Based on the novel of the same name by Peter Heller, the premise of The Dog Stars has enough narrative fuel to fit a bog-standard filler episode of The Walking Dead. Set in the year 2035, a devastating flu pandemic has wiped out most of the United States. Humanity has splintered into multiple types of video-game-esque factions: impressively tattooed ‘Reapers’, roaming scavengers, and horse-riding hunters. Avoiding these groups is former civilian pilot Hig (Jacob Elordi), a mechanic who lives at a Colorado airstrip with former marine Bangley (Josh Brolin) and his dog, Jasper.
Bangley believes he is living out the American Dream as he adopts a grizzled survivalist lifestyle, sniping any raiders who step foot on his property with no questions asked. Hig is a lot more altruistic, constantly flying his Cessna 182 to deliver supplies and aid to a local Mennonite community filled with immunocompromised children. In a throwaway role, Benedict Wong occasionally appears in the background as the children’s guardian, Aaron.
Hig also regularly visits his old home to mourn his wife, Melissa (Sai Bennett). Do not expect anything from her character beyond ‘dead mother with unborn child’. Hig’s humane and grief-stricken behaviour butt heads with Bangley’s more isolationist mindset, something they argue about often. During one such altercation, Hig suffers a further tragedy in a scavenger attack gone wrong. Forlorn and fed up, he decides to leave Bangley in search of a greater community. His plane immediately malfunctions, he gets stranded after a run-in with wild bison, and quickly finds himself acquainted with nearby rancher, Pops (Guy Pearce).
Pops is a former Navy SEAL and protective father of Cima (Margaret Qualley), a young medic who quickly grows attached to Hig as they bond over both losing their spouses. It takes nearly a full hour to establish these characters meeting, something the screenplay by Mark L. Smith fails to structure properly with a particularly arduous first act. The pacing across the entire film feels disjointed, including a sequence with Allison Janney towards the end that feels like it belongs in Bioshock or Fallout, not a Ridley Scott blockbuster.
Jacob Elordi is disappointingly one-note as the mopey but kind Hig, struggling to hold onto a character who’s written with clichéd and paper-thin characterisation. Tired flashbacks, trite writing, and a flat performance make it desperately hard to care about what happens to this sad do-gooder. Margaret Qualley isn’t given much more to do either, often resorting to a conventional aid worker and love interest without much personality. Guy Pearce and Josh Brolin are the only two clearly having any fun on this set, even if their ‘hardened soldier’ personas come as a very simple register for them both.
Shot in Italy as a stand-in for Colorado, the cinematography by Erik Messerschmidt beautifully captures all the aerial sequences as Hig flies over breathtaking mountains and devastated landscapes. There are dilapidated skyscrapers covered in moss that feel like the production designer lifted the idea straight from The Last of Us Part II. It’s never a bad-looking film, it just fails to ever capture a world that feels as dangerous, melancholic, or downright insane as the recent 28 Years Later films. It would have soared had its tone been weirder rather than drab.
A few bursts of action that bring the film to life remind us that Ridley was once the king of framing a brawny and well-realised action set piece. While the world-building surrounding the raiding groups falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, one sequence against the Reapers where Bangley goes full John Rambo in a Splinter Cell getup is gleefully muscular and entertaining. Another featuring a chase involving the Cessna also provides some brief thrills, but they both come too little too late in a film that mistakes sluggishness for Terrence Malick-like profundity.
The Dog Stars is an empty vessel of a film that’s never terrible enough to make the audience angry and never good enough for anyone to remember it. Ridley Scott’s direction is as unfocused as it is lifeless, wasting an A-list cast and absorbing visuals on a by-the-numbers post-apocalyptic drama with a deeply lethargic pace. It wants to be a meditation on the remnants of humanity finding community within each other, but when it finally looks up to its eponymous stars, the only thing twinkling is tedious mediocrity.
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