Sir Ridley Scott has earned the right to make a film as derivative as The Dog Stars. Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) alone sealed his status as one of the great fathers of modern sci-fi, and there’s nary a Dune or a Project Hail Mary now that isn’t covered in his fingerprints (certainly, there’d be no Project Hail Mary without Scott’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s previous novel, The Martian, in 2015).
His new post-apocalyptic drama can be roughly divided into three major set pieces: the bit that feels like 28 Days Later (2002), the bit that feels like Mad Max (1979), and the bit that feels like the video game Fallout: New Vegas (2010). I imagine Scott would defend against such accusations with a shrugged, “well, everyone stole from me, so who’s to say I can’t do a little borrowing too?” Fair enough. That doesn’t make The Dogs Stars any more compelling to watch.
The problem lies, I suspect, with Scott’s choice of source material: Peter Heller’s 2012 novel of the same name. It’s the story of a man, Hig (Jacob Elordi), his dog, and his plane pitted against untamed forces – not to be confused with the upcoming man/dog/plane film starring Brad Pitt, Heart of the Beast. An infectious virus has wiped out the majority of the population, dividing the world into those who maintained civility and the “Reapers”, those who have descended into madness and barbarity.
open image in galleryHig, haunted by the usual sun-dappled flashbacks of his beautiful dead wife, lives on an old Colorado airstrip with veteran Bangley (Josh Brolin). Bangley is an isolationist, content with delivering a headshot to any soul who strays too close to the perimeter. Hig dreams of community, aiding the local Mennonites, led by Benedict Wong’s Aaron, and chasing a garbled radio call on the other side of the mountain. Along the way, he stumbles across a farm owned by Cima (Margaret Qualley) and her Pops (Guy Pearce).
Scott and screenwriter Mark L Smith clearly intended for The Dog Stars to wrestle with the personal devastation wrought by Covid, and there are a few scattered, tender moments shared between these characters burdened with unimaginable survivor’s guilt. But Heller’s novel, published in 2012, was dealing with hypotheticals; in fact, the former editor of National Geographic Adventure seemed more interested in lush, extensive descriptions of the Colorado forests than he was in the “whys” and “how’s” of societal collapse.
In contrast, part of Scott’s genius has always been in the sense of history and texture behind his created worlds, in the invitation to imagine what lingers outside of the frame. Only, there’s very little cohesion to the visual language of The Dog Stars. Hig, Cima, and Pops stumble across an upper-crust community run by Allison Janney’s Darlene, in which everyone shares a fixation on mid-century music and style. Fallout backed its retrofuturistic aesthetics and uncanny Americana with an alternative history in which the nuclear age never ended and nationalistic propaganda went into overdrive. Here, Darlene is the way she is because that’s how post-apocalyptic dystopias are expected to look and behave.
open image in galleryAt other times, The Dogs Stars operates as a pseudo-western, as Hig journeys West in search of a better life. This causes its own problems: if the “civilised” survivors are the cowboys in their hats and flannels, then how do we square the “Reapers” within that narrative, especially when the camera chooses, for example, to linger on one attacker with a mohawk hairstyle (named after the Indigenous nation) wielding an axe against Hig and his crew’s firearms?
And who is Hig even meant to be to his audience? An everyman, the story would indicate, yet he’s played by Elordi as pointedly introspective, a Romantic poet in a Carhartt jacket, who appears to act uncomfortably out of character whenever he’s suddenly expected to wisecrack like Harrison Ford. The Dog Stars barely seems to know what it is. Neither prescient nor reflective, it looks to other apocalypses for its substance.
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Dir: Ridley Scott. Starring: Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, Allison Janney, Benedict Wong. Cert 15, 118 minutes.
‘The Dog Stars’ is in cinemas from 28 August