‘The Dog Stars’ Review: Jacob Elordi Leads Ridley Scott’s Uneven Survival Tale

Written well before the COVID-19 pandemic —it was published in 2012— The Dog Stars imagined what might happen if a virus of that scale wiped out much of the world’s population, leaving only a handful of survivors scattered across the globe. Now that Ridley Scott’s film adaptation has been released, the novel’s dystopian premise no longer feels quite so far-fetched. In fact, back in 2020 and 2021, we came remarkably close to living through something similar. Or, to put it another way, it happened in a version that proved slightly more manageable than the one depicted here.

The Dog Stars is an attempt to imagine the consequences of such a catastrophe. Mark L. Smith’s screenplay makes little effort to explain exactly what happened. As anyone who’s seen a post-apocalyptic movie knows, the cause ultimately matters very little. What’s far more interesting is how humanity responds. Judging by what we see here, the answer is that—with very few exceptions—it responds badly. Very badly.

Jacob Elordi plays Hig, one of the apparent few survivors of the vaguely defined viral catastrophe. A mechanic and a pilot, he lives at an abandoned airport with his loyal (and aging) dog alongside Bangley (Josh Brolin), one of those survivalists who seem to have spent their entire lives preparing for precisely this kind of scenario. Their coexistence isn’t always harmonious, but they complement each other well. Hig flies into the nearby, deserted city of Denver in search of supplies, while Bangley defends their territory with clinical, utterly dispassionate violence. If someone approaches carrying a weapon, his philosophy is simple: shoot first and ask… well, there are no questions. You eliminate the threat, burn the body, and move on.

Hig, however, is restless and unwilling to settle for that existence. He’s obsessed with tracing the source of a radio transmission that seems to be coming from the relatively nearby city of Grand Junction. After a tragic falling-out between the two men, Hig decides to leave their refuge and head out in search of whatever lies beyond. The journey, naturally, proves far more perilous than he imagined. His plane literally falls out of the sky near the home of Cima (Margaret Qualley) and her father, Pops (Guy Pearce). There, for the first time, the possibility of a new life begins to emerge. At the same time, a series of violent events threatening both settlements puts that fragile hope in jeopardy.

The Dog Stars gets off to an promising start: quiet, measured, punctuated by brief moments of tension that arise organically. In its own way, it plays like a frontier western, with two men defending their makeshift stronghold against threats that can emerge from anywhere. For quite a while, the film maintains that restrained rhythm, embracing an almost melancholic perspective that quietly intrudes upon a story that seems, on the surface, to be asking for more action. The action does arrive—this is Ridley Scott, after all—but once it does, the film begins to lose its grip. And it never really recovers.

Somewhere after the first act—or perhaps midway through the second—the film starts piling together attacks, mistakes, violent confrontations, and escalating crises to the point where the audience can’t help but wonder how any of these people managed to survive for so long in the first place. Almost simultaneously, both camps—Bangley’s on one side, Hig’s, Cima’s, and Pops’ on the other—come under assault from different forces. Left with no alternatives, the survivors set out for the mythical destination of Grand Junction, with little idea of what awaits them there.

It’s in this second half that Scott seems either to lose control of the material or to become trapped by a screenplay that spins increasingly out of control, without ever capturing the essence of what it’s trying to do. The veteran filmmaker has always been more comfortable with grounded drama than with absurdity, offbeat humor, or genuine strangeness. The Dog Stars makes that limitation painfully clear. Once the film enters that territory, Scott seems almost completely at sea. Everything he had handled with admirable confidence while establishing this world is undone by the arrival of new characters and increasingly bizarre, almost ridiculous situations. At that point, it feels as though we’re watching a different movie altogether—more excessive, cut from a different literary and cinematic cloth—and one Scott simply doesn’t know how to navigate. Perhaps David Lynch could have made sense of that shift. But it’s not terrain that suits the octogenarian director of Alien and Blade Runner.

A post-apocalyptic film that asks questions about solidarity, cruelty, and the possibility of rebuilding community in a world where mere survival often becomes the only priority, The Dog Stars is an odd, uneven work that seems to change abruptly midway through, squandering many of the strengths established in its thoughtful opening half. Scott also adds a couple of action sequences that aren’t in the novel. Though staged with his customary technical assurance, they feel artificial, inserted to satisfy the presumed demands of an audience that expects a certain amount of human carnage from its blockbuster entertainment. That this carnage ultimately undermines the very ideas the film is trying to explore—as so often happens with supposedly anti-war war movies—may be a contradiction that cinema itself needs to confront.