‘The Dog Stars’ Review: It’s the End of the World As We Know It (From Many Other Movies Like This)
Ridley Scott, now 88 years old, has been directing features for almost half a century. He still works at a relentless clip; over the last decade, he’s released seven films — and that’s despite a global pandemic.
Scott may still have the stamina of a film student, but even he would surely agree that he’s far closer to the end of his career than the beginning. And that perspective offers the only interesting reading of his latest project, The Dog Stars. This is a story about the end — the end of everything, really, but also a more personal end. The one that comes for each of us, and maybe sooner than we expect.
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The man at the center of the film knows about that end all too well. He’s a gentle, resourceful mechanic and pilot named Hig (Jacob Elordi). Despite enormous tragedies in his past, Hig still holds out hope for the world — although by most measures the world ended years ago because of a deadly flu pandemic. That virus took Hig’s wife and left him one of the handful of survivors in the Western United States who hasn’t devolved into a feral, animalistic scavenger. Hig’s only allies in this harsh, unforgiving landscape are a pragmatic survivalist named Bangley (Josh Brolin), and his loyal dog Jasper, who keeps Hig company on supply runs into the ruins of Denver to collect food, medicine, and gas.
With a scraggly goatee and a leathery face, Brolin looks every bit the part of a prepper living out his wildest dreams in the midst of humanity’s ultimate nightmare. Elordi — towering, shaggy, always covered in just the right amount of facial scruff to look rugged and not unkempt — is maybe a little too pretty to play a grieving widower in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Although recent parts like the title role in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein let Elordi show a little more range, The Dog Stars mostly asks him to stand amidst scenes of decay and rot looking handsome and melancholy in a variety of artfully distressed T-shirts.
But what would a Hollywood movie be without at least one or two incongrously attractive stars? And wouldn’t you know it, amongst all the inhuman tattooed cannibals roaming the dystopian wastelands, Hig finds another beautiful survivor. That would be Cima (Margaret Qualley), who lives on a cattle ranch with her ornery father (a superbly gruff Guy Pearce). For years, Hig heard a faint radio signal coming from Grand Junction, but his plane craps out before he can make it. Landing in the valley near Cima’s ranch, Hig makes an instant ally of her — and an instant enemy of her father.
Taken from the novel by Peter Heller, The Dog Stars proceeds in methodical, episodic, but not especially thrilling fashion, as Hig attempts to find signs of life beyond the perimeter of Bangley’s heavily fortified compound. It’s a Ridley Scott movie, which means it is handsomely mounted and filled with plenty of stylish visuals, including some striking shots of Hig flying his plane high above Colorado in search of some semblance of civilization amidst the devastation. Or, at least, that’s what it means until its final act, when writer Mark L. Smith’s script goes way over the top and almost entirely off the rails as it veers into territory that belongs to a more surreal strain of post-apocalyptic fiction like Fallout or 28 Years Later.
But even some of The Dog Stars’ grittier and more grounded moments feel familiar. There have been so many movies and television shows like it in recent years, ones that depict similarly ruined worlds in the not-too-distant-future, decimated by some combination of climate change or pandemics or man’s inherent arrogance and cruelty. After a couple hours of ceaseless death and destruction, they invariably conclude with some faint glimmer of hope, as if a couple of seconds of uplift can negate the larger impression left by the previous 120 minutes of grim bloodshed.
So why did trailblazing 88-year-old Ridley Scott want to make the tired, listless Dog Stars? At times, he seems to speak through some of its characters in imparting a message about enjoying the time you have left with the people you love. Those are wise words, although they might ring hollow coming from a film that often feels a little devoid of passion itself. The Dog Stars wants the relationship between Hig and Cima to build to this epic tortured romance imperiled by their shared grief, but Elordi and Qualley rarely expand their performances beyond a lot of mopey smoldering.
Attractive as the rest of the movie is around them, Scott’s direction feels a little by-the-numbers at times too. It works out to a film that’s a little better than you might expect from something released on the last Friday in August, and one that’s a little worse than you might expect from the man who made Alien, Blade Runner, and The Martian.
Additional Thoughts:
-While The Dog Stars did not exactly captivate me, I must admit I find the search for the Ridley Scott of it all in this film kind of fascinating. I wonder: In telling the story of this grieving man who has lost his family, is Scott actually making a film about his own feelings about the loss of his two brothers?
RATING: 5/10
