‘The Dog Stars’ Review: A Gorgeous Apocalypse That Forgot To Bring A Story
Ridley Scott closes out a busy stretch of studio filmmaking with ‘The Dog Stars,’ an adaptation of Peter Heller’s 2012 novel that drops Jacob Elordi into a flu ravaged America a decade after civilization collapsed. He plays Hig, a civilian pilot holed up in a fortified Colorado hangar with Bangley, a hardened former Marine played by Josh Brolin. Between them and Hig’s dog Jasper, the two have built a fragile, functional peace against a world overrun by roaming scavengers known as Reapers.
That peace cracks the moment Hig picks up a mysterious radio transmission from somewhere beyond his radius, and it sends him climbing into his old Cessna in search of whoever, or whatever, is still out there. Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, Allison Janney, and Benedict Wong round out a cast that suggests a studio confident it had assembled something special, arriving in theaters on August 28 under real anticipation given Scott’s recent run through ‘Napoleon,’ ‘House of Gucci,’ and ‘Gladiator II.’
I wanted to love the atmosphere of this thing, and for stretches I nearly did. Erik Messerschmidt’s cinematography turns the Cessna flyovers into genuine eye candy, all empty mountain ridgelines and dead quiet skies, and there is a version of ‘The Dog Stars’ that trusts that imagery enough to let the silence do the storytelling.
Instead, the film keeps second guessing its own restraint. It teases you with a world that clearly has history, a virus nobody bothers to name, an unclear scope of how much of the country or the planet even got wiped out, and a friendship between Hig and Bangley whose origin is never once explained, and it treats all of that ambiguity as a feature rather than a gap. Mystery only works when the answers feel worth chasing, and here the questions just evaporate.
The bigger issue is tonal whiplash. One stretch plays like a hushed character study about grief and isolation, and the next lurches into shootouts and survivalist set pieces that feel bolted on from an entirely different, louder movie. Bangley’s gleeful appetite for violence is clearly meant to unsettle Hig’s cautious optimism, but the script never digs into that tension with any real curiosity, so it just sits there as a philosophical stalemate the movie forgot to resolve.
What keeps ‘The Dog Stars’ from collapsing entirely is Elordi, who plays Hig’s quiet ache with more nuance than the writing earns. Brolin, too, finds shading in Bangley that the page doesn’t always supply, turning a walking cliche of paranoid masculinity into someone almost sympathetic in flashes. Qualley and Pearce arrive later and do solid work with thin material, though the film never figures out what to do with Janney or Wong beyond filling out the ensemble.
By the time Hig’s journey toward hope and human connection reaches its supposed emotional peak, the film has spent so much goodwill on unanswered setup and jarring detours that the payoff lands soft. It looks like a prestige survival epic and occasionally sounds like one, but the story underneath never earns the weight it’s clearly reaching for, and a two hour runtime starts to feel considerably longer once the momentum stalls in the back half.
For me this settles into a handsomely shot, well acted disappointment rather than a disaster, a movie coasting on craft and star power while its screenplay drifts without direction. Scott and his collaborators clearly had the pieces for something haunting, and Elordi in particular deserves a sharper vehicle than the one he was handed here. I’m landing on 5 out of 10, generous mostly because the performances and imagery keep it watchable even when the plotting doesn’t.
Have you caught ‘The Dog Stars’ yet, and did Hig and Bangley’s post apocalyptic odd couple routine work for you the way it didn’t quite work for me? Drop your verdict in the comments.
