Ridley Scott’s latest, The Dog Stars, is a strange beast of a film. At just short of two hours, it’s a post-apocalyptic movie that can’t quite decide what it wants to be; too sleek and glossy to be taken properly seriously, and too similar to other end-of-the-world narratives to feel original.
Based on Peter Heller’s 2012 novel of the same name and adapted for the screen by Mark L. Smith, the film is set after a devastating flu epidemic that has almost wiped out humanity. The story centres on Hig (Jacob Elordi), a former mechanic turned amateur pilot, and Bangley (Josh Brolin), a hardened former Marine, as the two deal with outside threats from other survivors.
While Bangley is happy just to survive another day, thanks to his military background, Hig is still mourning the death of his wife eight years earlier. For the young man, simply staying alive isn’t enough, he needs to feel hope, and the chance of a future where death isn’t everything.
Hig’s one constant through it all is his dog, raised from a puppy back when his wife was still alive, the last living link to the world he lost. The dog becomes his most trusted companion in the wasteland, and it’s a small gut-punch of a thread running through the film that Hig will eventually have to learn to carry on without him.
Meanwhile, Guy Pearce and Margaret Qualley play Pops and Cima, a father-daughter survivor duo whose carefully guarded world is upended when Hig crash-lands near their hidden wilderness home. What begins as an unwelcome intrusion slowly turns into something more between Cima and Hig. But could their fragile relationship survive, or are they destined for heartbreak?
The film’s antagonists come in the form of other survivors gone rogue; bands of scavengers who’ve shed any trace of the world before, depicted less as people than as something closer to savages, almost feral in the way they move and hunt, more zombie than human. It’s an effective enough device on paper, but one that never quite lands the way it should. Elsewhere, Benedict Wong turns in a genuinely good performance as the head of a Mennonite community who befriends Hig. Wong brings a quiet, watchful authority to the role. But he’s given so little screen time that it’s easy to forget his subplot is even part of the final product.
Scott doesn’t pretend to reinvent the post-apocalyptic genre; if anything, he borrows fairly heavily from other, more successful productions. There are scenes that could have easily come out of the latest 28 Years Later franchise, minus the zombies. Perhaps that’s the issue: the danger here is never quite clear enough to generate real tension.
The performances go a long way toward carrying the film. Elordi plays the silent, broody type well, but the character itself is too archetypal to be anything we haven’t seen before. Qualley is great as Cima, but she isn’t given much to work with. The rest of the cast turn in good performances across the board, even where the script doesn’t ask much of them.
The film has an epic, sweeping quality to its cinematography, courtesy of Erik Messerschmidt, and a score by Harry Gregson-Williams that does exactly what’s expected of it, underlining every beat in the most predictable way.
It isn’t really a great film. But it’s entertaining enough to hold your attention for two hours, even if it’s unlikely to stay with you for long after.
