The Dog Stars review: His Bark Is Worse Than His Blight

It’s been five years since Ridley Scott made a good movie (The Last Duel), but that hasn’t stopped him from trying. Undaunted by age, the 88-year-old Briton keeps cranking out handsome, nobly ambitious period pieces: a biopic of a fashion designer (House of Gucci), a military epic about a tyrant (Napoleon), a long-awaited return to the Colosseum (Gladiator II). (IMDb currently assigns Scott to eight upcoming titles in varying stages of development.) Now he’s back (to the future!) with The Dog Stars, a somber post-apocalyptic thriller that’s temporally different from his recent work, but qualitatively similar. It occasionally approximates an interesting movie, yet it’s ultimately forgettable.

To the extent The Dog Stars resonates at all, it does so metatextually. Based on novel by Peter Heller (the screenwriter is Mark L. Smith, whose uneven résumé includes Twisters and The Revenant; Christopher Wilkinson receives a “writer” credit), the film takes place in a depopulated landscape whose remnants of civilization—dilapidated buildings swarmed by vines, highways littered with rusty cars—will appear familiar to viewers of dystopian fiction. But while the movie is appropriately spare with backstory—a virus spread, and people died—its fanciful premise is nonetheless unsettling, given that here in reality, our nation’s top health official is a worm-infested eugenicist whose mission is to eradicate vaccines. Earlier in August, the “sex purge” concept of One Night Only seemed less ridiculous than it otherwise might have; three weeks later, Scott’s vision of a world ravaged by a pandemic plays eerily like prophecy. Imaginary futures feel less distant than they used to.

In any event, the early scenes of The Dog Stars carry a pleasing simplicity, even if they obviously evoke I Am Legend. As there, an apparent lone survivor, accompanied only by his trusty canine sidekick, scavenges an abandoned metropolis (Italian locations stand in for Denver), trying in vain to make radio contact with fellow citizens. But where Will Smith was terrorized by zombie-like monsters, Hig (Jacob Elordi) and his beloved Belgian Malinois face more prosaic threats. Surveying the wreckage from his sturdy propeller plane, Hig totes along a semiautomatic rifle to defend himself against less decent, more selfish humans, whom he calls “roaches.” He also hears tell of “reapers,” an assembling throng of ruthless invaders whose indistinct personality is among the movie’s disappointments.

There are quite a few of those, including Josh Brolin, who previously collaborated with Scott 19 years ago in American Gangster, where he played a marvelously louche detective. He’s similarly vicious (if less charismatic) here as Bangley, Hig’s rugged housemate who defends their modest homestead with extreme prejudice. Bangley takes a shoot-first, ask-questions-never approach to trespassers, but while his gruff nihilism is designed to contrast with Hig’s muted optimism, their philosophical conflict lacks texture, and their dialogue is clunky and expository. Structurally, The Dog Stars follows Hig on an episodic adventure, but it occasionally and awkwardly cuts back to Bangley; despite Brolin’s convincing physicality, his violent escapades are a dimly lit drag.

More engaging, or at least better looking, is Cima (Margaret Qualley), a similarly guarded loner who lives with her father, called Pops (a solid Guy Pearce), and whom Hig meets after he crash-lands his plane in a nearby field. Hig and Cima are both widowed, and their wary, inevitable courtship reflect the movie’s broader thematic concerns. Fundamentally, The Dog Stars is about how and why people soldier on in the face of catastrophe, be it personal (the loss of a spouse) or global (the end of the world). The project of rebuilding society begins with individual souls choosing to get out of bed, each and every day.

“You don’t have a monopoly on grief,” Cima says to Hig after her late-night cozying ends in frustration rather than consummation. It’s a good line, and in its middle stretch, The Dog Stars laudably resists contrived catharsis, instead supplying something more slippery. Yet at the same time, the movie’s brooding quality betrays its overall lack of energy. Aside from one kinetic action sequence where Hig attempts to take off as marauders leap onto his plane (Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, this is not), the set pieces are flat, while the characters exhibit minimal progression beyond their mending of broken hearts, which proves less poignant than perfunctory. Running under two hours, this is Scott’s shortest film since 2013’s The Counselor, but its pacing is nonetheless sluggish, and it should have excised its last 20 minutes; the denouement is shameful, eschewing provocative ambiguity in favor of drippy sentimentality.

For all its moodiness, The Dog Stars is most enjoyable at its most absurd: a fraught encounter with a patently untrustworthy sect of survivalists who’ve created a sanctuary (but for whom??) at a derelict airport. They’re preposterous—they seem to have watched Dawn of the Dead one too many times and decided that the biker gang were the real heroes—but they’re led by a martini-swilling Allison Janney, whose wolfish glint and aquamarine garb add a figurative and literal jolt of color to Scott’s gloomy, washed-out aesthetic.

Excitement isn’t really the point of The Dog Stars, though its true purpose remains elusive. It’s a love story without emotions, an action flick without thrills, and a social allegory without commentary. Or maybe it has all of those things, just in insufficient quantity and clumsily stewed together. The title refers to gazing upward and locating patterns in the constellations. But for all of Hig’s aerial derring-do, this passable, confused movie rarely gets off the ground.

Grade: C+