'The Dog Stars' review: Ridley Scott's stagnant apocalyptic thriller loses the plot
- Nate Adams
- 8 hours ago
- 5 min read
Courtesy of 20th Century Studios
In a summer where big, bold movies emerged and fresh voices brought distinct identities and flavor to their work, it’s borderline insanity that Ridley Scott, one of our greatest living filmmakers, has delivered such a whiff in the final stretch of the busiest moviegoing season of the year. That would be “The Dog Stars,” a stagnant post-apocalyptic thriller that never finds much of a reason to exist beyond its impressive scenery and stacked ensemble led by Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley and Guy Pearce.
It follows the same familiar playbook as countless other end-of-the-world movies, from “A Quiet Place” to the “28 Years Later” franchise, where some cataclysmic event has decimated the population and forced the survivors to live off the grid, far removed from even the slightest hint of civilization. In this case, a devastating flu has done most of the dirty work, but where the best examples of the genre use their circumstances to explore compelling characters, relationships and the different ways people respond to desperation, “The Dog Stars” struggles to find anything particularly interesting to say. Scott, working from a screenplay by Mark L. Smith and Christopher Wilkinson that adapts Peter Heller’s novel, has the benefit of a cute dog and a small plane that allows its protagonist to traverse the Colorado wilderness, but those ingredients can only carry the movie so far.
The pilot of that aircraft is Hig (Elordi, soft-spoken as always), a former mechanic who lives in the wilderness near the town of Erie with a disgruntled former Marine named Bangley (Brolin). Hig spends his days flying reconnaissance missions in his yellow plane alongside his pup Jasper, surveying the surrounding area, gathering supplies and keeping watch for “reapers,” which is just this movie’s terminology for the crazed looters who apparently spend their days waiting for an opportunity to murder whoever happens to cross their path.
Elordi is solid, particularly in his scenes with Jasper, which are among the few instances where “The Dog Stars” manages to generate a genuine emotional response. Yet the tepid screenplay gives him surprisingly little to work with. We get brief flashbacks to Hig’s life before the mass extinction event and glimpses of the grief he still carries, but they are handled so fleetingly that the movie never allows us to become invested in the person he was, the people he lost or the person he has become. There is an emotional foundation sitting right there, but instead of digging into it, the movie keeps moving on to the next encounter.
After picking up a faint radio transmission roughly 300 miles away, Hig decides to fly toward Grand Junction in search of its source, hoping to find one of those elusive safe havens that characters in seemingly every post-apocalyptic movie eventually become convinced is waiting just over the horizon. For Hig, though, the journey represents more than simple curiosity. He wants proof that there is still a life somewhere beyond survival, and perhaps even an opportunity for the fresh start that his isolated existence with Bangley could never provide. That motivation should give “The Dog Stars” its emotional engine, yet the journey that follows becomes a collection of loosely connected episodes rather than a story steadily building toward something meaningful.
There are some beautiful aerial shots of Colorado sunrises, mountain peaks and sprawling canyons (or the illusion of it since the movie was filmed in Italy), and Scott can still field an engrossing sequence when the material gives him something to sink his teeth into. The standout comes when Bangley is forced to fend off an army of crazed looters inside his hangar while Hig is away on his journey. Brolin gives the movie a grizzled intensity that it sorely misses whenever he disappears, and the sequence briefly provides the danger and urgency absent from much of the surrounding film. Unfortunately, it is bookended by one of the laziest-looking explosions I can remember seeing in a Ridley Scott movie. This is the same filmmaker who made “Alien,” “Blade Runner” and “The Martian,” so watching something this visually uninspired emerge under his watch is genuinely baffling.
Even great filmmakers have their duds, of course, and Scott, now 89, certainly isn’t slowing down. If anything, “The Dog Stars” occasionally feels like a movie that needed him to slow down and interrogate the material a little more. The screenplay keeps throwing strange new elements into Hig’s path without doing the work required to make any of them compelling. There is a screaming tribe of tattoo-covered hooligans riding around on horseback and wielding crossbows who arrive with virtually no explanation. Later, Hig encounters an unsettling community led by a character played by Allison Janney, and the movie once again introduces a potentially fascinating corner of this ruined world only to leave you wondering whether the scenes explaining any of it were accidentally left on the cutting-room floor. Ambiguity can be effective, particularly in a story about people navigating the remnants of civilization, but there is a difference between leaving something open to interpretation and simply failing to develop it. “The Dog Stars” too often lands in the latter category.
Then comes the expected love interest, Cima (Qualley), because apparently Hig is fortunate enough to stumble across one of the most attractive single women remaining on planet Earth during his expedition. Funny how that works. She lives with her father, Pops (Pearce), and their introduction should represent the culmination of Hig’s search for human connection. Instead, Cima feels less like a fully formed person than another narrative checkpoint the movie expects Hig to reach. Qualley and Elordi are appealing performers, but the screenplay never gives their relationship enough room to develop naturally, while Pearce, muffled and perpetually scowling, seems to have wandered in from a completely different post-apocalyptic movie.
That ultimately becomes the central problem with “The Dog Stars.” It contains all the components of a potentially moving survival story, including grief, loneliness, companionship, violence and the basic human desire to find something worth living for after everything familiar has disappeared, yet Scott and his screenwriters never weave those ideas into a satisfying whole. Characters arrive and disappear, bizarre threats materialize without context, and Hig keeps moving forward without the movie giving his journey the emotional momentum it desperately needs.
By the time we reach the end, “The Dog Stars” feels as though it has gone in circles despite covering hundreds of miles. Plenty has technically happened, yet remarkably little of it feels consequential. That is especially surprising coming from Scott, a filmmaker who has spent decades proving how efficiently he can turn sprawling material into muscular commercial entertainment. I’m glad he is still working this rigorously this late in his career, and I hope he continues doing so for as long as he wants. But by golly, man, please pick some better, less disposable material.
Grade: C-
THE DOG STARS is now playing in theaters.
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