Alien and Blade Runner director Ridley Scott, whose modern career seems to flip back and forth between hidden gems and severe misfires, is back in cinemas.
This time the film is The Dog Stars. Jacob Elordi is Hig, a mechanic turned scavenger living with his German Shepherd, Jasper, in a post-apocalyptic wasteland called America.
The populace have been all but wiped out by some kind of biblical Flu (a somewhat more plausible prospect in the 2020s), leaving Hig and other survivors left to fight for the scraps.
‘That’s just the world we live in. If the virus didn’t take you, then something else will.’
Landing his trusty Cessna in an eerily empty city, a crazed stranger warns him of a bloodthirsty new gang making their way across the North West: the feral Reapers. Meanwhile, mysterious radio signals from a distant community lead Hig to fly further out than ever before in search of safe harbour, leaving his irritable partner in crime, played by Josh Brolin, behind to watch the airfield they call home.
Hig’s travels see him shacked up with The Substance star Margaret Qualley’s Cima and her overly-protective father, Jack. With his plane grounded, he’ll have to make nice with the locals if he wants to get back up into the air. Everyone has their story, though, and Cima is quietly grieving for her late husband, just as Hig grieves for his long lost wife who passed in the early days of the outbreak. Can anyone find a connection between strangers in this hostile and oppressive new world or are we destined to remain isolated and guarded with a constant eye on an exit route? That’s the central question of The Dog Stars.
This actually stems from a 2012 book by Peter Heller, which won a lot of readers over with its atmosphere and generally positive message. Scott does well to translate that ambience onto screen – there’s always been something morbidly stunning about these desolate apocalyptic landscapes where cities become ghost towns.
Huge wide shots of empty streets call to mind those strange photos left over from the Pandemic – the ones where the Royal Mile looks like some kind of liminal space – and Hig spends a lot of time flying his plane through rural American vistas, a dot among pine trees and stretching lakes. The acoustic, muted score is very Last of Us and the whole affair owes a debt to The Walking Dead, which even included a group called the Reapers in its final seasons, but there’s some superficially compelling stuff on offer here.
Oddly, that’s about all there is to this, though. It’s a lot more character driven than its marketing would have you think. The trailer has Brolin warning Hig about the oncoming Reaper threat, which leads you to expect some kind of third act showdown, but no such resolution ever comes. The closest thing this film has to a climax appears in what really ought to be the second act, but it crops up so randomly and is so blink-and-you’ll-miss-it that it’s hard to properly appreciate it.
It’s a bombastic little scene, but it really felt to me like Scott wanted to shoot a parody of the action genre but knew he didn’t have enough for a whole film, so just whacked that little five-minute short into this wholly different beast. Given how slow-paced and reflective this film is (which isn’t inherently a bad thing – I just think the characters needed much more development and intrigue for that to work), I don’t think your climax should have people laughing out loud in the cinema at the tonal whiplash of it all, but that’s exactly what I did.
There’s nothing outright bad about The Dog Stars; the whole film just feels like a non-event, one I’ll forget about among the line-up of Scott’s back-catalogue. It’s not his worst picture, but it has very little in it that hits home in any memorable way. House of Gucci was messy, but had a bit of camp and wackiness to it; I really enjoyed The Last Duel for building up to its central fight to the death with each character’s unique recollection of events and Napoleon at least had Joaquin Phoenix to its name.
This boasts Elordi, Qualley and Brolin, who all have good chemistry as they hurl quips and glances at each other, but the film’s narrative just plods along until, at the two-hour mark, it decides it’s had enough and cuts to credits. Despite the film’s length – those two hours are nothing to sniff at – I felt really surprised when the credits came, not because of any last-minute revelations or neat conclusions, but because the film just felt rather unfinished.
This won’t have been the case, but it really did feel like they had a third act planned and then just sort of ran out of time when it came to shooting it. It’s an odd experience and one that’s hard to describe. I’d say you really need to see it to properly understand what I mean, but this isn’t a film you need to rush to the cinema for and certainly not one you need to catch in IMAX, despite what the marketing would have you think.
BBFC: Rated 15 for strong language, violence, injury detail.
The Dog Stars is in cinemas now.
