Ridley Scott’s “The Dog Stars” feels like a film stuck in its first act. For the entire runtime, you are just waiting, waiting and waiting for things to kick into gear, but they never do.
It is an odd beast, a character-driven film without interesting characters and an action movie with minimal action set pieces. The pacing is far too slow and kills whatever momentum or tension crops up. The dog barely even factors in.
Jacob Elordi stars as Hig, a young man living in a post-apocalyptic Colorado, where an epidemic has wiped out most of the population. Life for Hig went from tending to his pregnant wife (a memory the film rehashes, same room and all, at least three times) to trudging around for supplies in the empty ruins of Denver.
The land is stalked by marauders known as “roaches,” mindless hordes of survivors who kill anyone on sight, ensuring that he’s all alone with his trusty pooch. Hig provides sustenance to a local Mennonite community and plays poker with useless piles of money with his older friend, Bangley (Josh Brolin), but after an attack from the roaches takes a particularly harsh toll, Hig decides to forge out on his own in his scrappy Cessna to discover if there is really anything else out there.
Director Ridley Scott holds a place in the film director pantheon, largely thanks to four wildly different classics: “Alien,” “Blade Runner,” “Thelma and Louise,” and “Gladiator.” However, outside of these, and a smattering of good-to-decent flicks, his career has declined.
At best, you get something forgettable yet inoffensive like “All the Money in the World”. At worst, you get "Dog Stars". It is so rote and thinly sketched you wonder if Scott’s entering a Woody Allen phase, making movies for the sake of making movies rather than pursuing any authentic creative drive.
With that said, Scott’s direction and lack of real vision for this project is not the only vice of the production, damning though it may be. Blame should be shared with Mark L. Smith’s shallow and unengaging script. Calling it Smith’s script feels disingenuous; “The Dog Stars” reeks of a film cobbled together from studio notes and focus group tests.
There are plenty of interesting aspects of the wasteland to explore–the way kindness to your fellow humans has been all but obliterated in the wake of societal collapse, the necessity of trying to rebuild society vs. simply carving out a decent living, even conforming to the standards of communities when pure isolation and danger is the alternative. “The Dog Stars” touches on none of these, favouring the familiar tropes and character beats that were stale decades ago.
In some ways, “The Dog Stars’” apathy crosses over into the off-putting. The idea of human survivors who have lost humanity is another avenue worth exploring, but in the roaches’ current form as a mob-shaped plot device, they might as well be zombies as seen in every other post-apocalypse movie. Furthermore, the roaches–with their face-paint, whooping, ability to mimic animal sounds, and incessant and unexplainable “savagery,” feel uncomfortably close to racist depictions of Native Americans.
Instead of any nuanced worldbuilding, we get archetypes bumping into each other and spouting dialogue trying and failing to sell their chemistry. Elordi launched into the A-list this decade with extremely buzzy roles in “Saltburn” and his Oscar-nominated turn in “Frankenstein,” but he’s unable to wrangle anything decent out of his character.
Hig is a bland approximation of the disgruntled loner fighter with a tragic backstory who learns to love again. Sound familiar? His most unique trait is a penchant for the f-word, though its usage is so haphazard that it more so plays as a forced character tic than a realistic speech pattern.
Margaret Qualley, another rising star, is stuck with the boring Cima. She is savvy enough to survive the near-wilderness conditions, but unfortunately never developed a personality outside of “young woman.” Cima bears a similar troubled past to Hig, this movie’s best justification for their dull romance.
Finally, we have not one, but two older male protector figures, with Cima’s father Jack introduced following the aforementioned Bangley. They amount to a scowling obstruction between Cima and Hig’s in the former case and an exposition machine with a beard in the latter.
“The Dog Stars” spends most of its runtime spinning its wheels with these cardboard cutouts without ever finding a way to engage the audience. The sparse fight scenes amount to so little and are so brief they come across as fulfilling an arbitrary mandate for an action sequence every x number of minutes from corporate higher-ups. The only interesting plot thread is a bizarre detour towards the end featuring Allison Janney as a deranged flight attendant, but the whole thing amounts to nothing.
“The Dog Stars” has the ingredients of a solid time at the movies. Ridley Scott has the chops to make great cinema, somewhere in there at least. Elordi, Qualley, Brolin and Pearce are more than capable actors. Even the script could rise to the occasion with a few more drafts of fleshing-out. However, it feels like everyone just went through the motions.
Maybe at some stage, someone felt passionate about bringing this story to the big screen, but now? Scott probably did not have anything better to do, Elordi enjoyed hanging out with a dog enough to sign on and everyone else was just along for the ride (and the paycheck). Good for them, I guess. But for an audience? It is a skip.
"The Dog Stars" is now playing in theaters nationwide.
