Gabrielle Moss has been writing about pop culture for over a decade, for publications including The New Yorker, GQ.com, Slate, Bustle, New York Magazine, and many more. Her book,
“Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of ’80s and ’90s Teen Fiction,” was released in 2018, and she was featured in the 2023 documentary “Judy Blume Forever.”
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The apocalypse — much like low-rise jeans, Adam Brody, and many other staples of 2000s pop culture — is making a comeback. Movies about the end of the world were a major box office staple of the Y2K decade; but while that era’s biggest hits, like *** 2012*****, I Am Legend *** and *** The Day After Tomorrow** offered sweeping, action-packed visions of Earth in the end times, the most recent crop of post-apocalyptic dramas, like *** The Last of Us*** and the 28 Years Later franchise, use the collapse of society as a jumping-off point to tell intimate, small-scale stories about human emotion.
Add to this new class of films Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars. Focused primarily on just four survivors of a super flu epidemic, The Dog Stars uses the post-apocalyptic world as a canvas to examine themes like love, loss, family, and human connection. Of course, when you think of “intimate, small-scale stories,” you’d be forgiven if Ridley Scott’s name immediately jump to mind. But while he often takes a turn toward the epic, Scott made his name with sci-fi masterpieces that brought us deep into the minds of their protagonists — a mode he most recently explored in 2015’s Oscar-nominated The Martian.
The Dog Stars is, unfortunately, not Alien, Blade Runner, or The Martian; instead, it’s an enjoyable but uneven film that knows what it wants to say but struggles with exactly how to say it. Is it a grim survival story? A classic action-adventure yarn? A Western about a mysterious stranger who comes to town, catches a local lady’s eye, and eventually saves a righteous ranch family from marauders? At different moments, The Dog Stars is each of these things. But while it offers some thrilling moments, solid performances, and breathtakingly lush landscape cinematography, it never quite coheres into the statement about love in times of crisis that it aspires to be.
In the year 2035, a super flu has killed off most of humanity, leaving only small, isolated pockets of survivors. Among those survivors is Hig (Jacob Elordi), a mechanic who’s as handy as he is sensitive. Still gutted by his wife’s death during the plague, Hig putters around the wasteland with his family dog Jasper, the only living reminder of his old life. Hig and Jasper scavenge goods from the dangerous ruins of Denver, then hop in Hig’s rusty Cessna, flying them back to the mountain compound he shares with a cynical, paranoid ex-Marine named Bangley (Josh Brolin).
Bangley is content with the duo’s semi-feral existence, which involves sleeping outdoors, playing card games for thousands of now-worthless dollars, patrolling their grounds with automatic weapons, and occasionally taking out an intruder with a bullet to the head. But Hig is a lover, not a fighter; he’s much happier bringing supplies to a local group of friendly Mennonite survivors than he is violently defending his home turf. After Bangley blocks Hig’s efforts to merge their group with the Mennonites, Hig instead becomes fixated on a mysterious radio transmission from Grand Junction, Colorado, which he hears for just a moment while cruising the lonely skies.
After a moment of violence leaves Hig unmoored and soured on Bangley, he takes off in his plane, ready to get to Grand Junction or die trying. But instead, his plane breaks down just outside the isolated ranch of Cima (Margaret Qualley), a doctor-in-training who had her education disrupted by the plague. Cima comes with her own cranky, gun-toting parental figure, Pops (Guy Pearce), but over time, she and her pa both warm up to the handsome, mysterious stranger who has interrupted their quiet existence. And when violence visits their remote homestead, the group hit the road together, taking off on the classic post-apocalyptic quest to find other survivors.
The Dog Stars covers some of the most classic cinematic turf there is: a broken hero’s journey back to life, as he finds meaning in new love and found family. But the film never quite gets to what it’s reaching for. Some of that is due to Mark L. Smith (The Revenant, Twisters)’s script, which touches the surface of many topics but doesn’t dig in deeply until the film’s end. We never find out exactly what is happening with any of the movie’s over-the-top villains, whose appearances are quick and backstories unknown. Hig’s biggest vulnerabilities are his all-consuming grief over his wife and his ongoing trust in humanity, but the film never really explores how it feels to live in a world where thinking the best of people might get you killed. And Hig’s love story with Cima, which unfolds slowly, somehow still feels rushed and half-done.
Some of that is also due to Elordi’s performance as Hig, which he never fully settles into. Elordi came to fame playing a series of, shall we say, challenging men, most notably the villainous Nate on Euphoria, and Felix, the gorgeous, vacant rich boy at the center of Saltburn. His angry, lonely, layered turn as The Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s** **Frankenstein showed that Elordi can thrive on screen even when he’s not playing guys you love to hate.
But Hig is a classic emotionally-wounded action hero, a man whose truest desire is for life to be simple and good. Elordi handles the physical end of being a hero well — he looks natural flying the plane, chopping down a tree, or wielding an automatic rifle, as he does throughout much of the film. But whether due to the script, direction, or Elordi’s character choices, the internal component of Hig never fully clicks into place. We hear a lot about Hig’s bottomless grief, but we don’t see it in his eyes, just like we never feel exactly what drives him to make the reckless choice to head off to Grand Junction.
Similarly, his romance with Cima, which is supposed to slowly restore his will to live, is told more than shown. Qualley is also often drawn to more challenging roles, be they the ditzy-yet-dark Manson girl Pussycat in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood or the physical embodiment of Hollywood’s cruel beauty standards in The Substance. Even in less successful films, like her collaborations with Ethan Coen, she brings an innate level of energy and internal complexity that elevate everything around her. But The Dog Stars never quite taps into Qualley’s deep well of charisma. Cima’s parallel grief and loneliness isn’t explored too deeply, and her moments of connection with Hig over their shared suffering don’t fully land.
The supporting actors have a much better time with it — perhaps because they don’t have to symbolize humanity’s ongoing search for connection, and can just have fun with the bizarre circumstances they’re in. Going forward, Elordi might do well to take a page from Brolin, a great actor who’s always had a little too much of an edge to play a clean-cut hero himself. Brolin’s Bangley — a grizzled, sure-shot vet who uses tough talk to obscure his obviously broken heart — is nothing new, especially for fans of post-apocalyptic cinema, where the Old Timer is a well-worn trope. But Brolin is a joy to watch as the curmudgeonly sniper who’s enjoying the end of the world a little more than he should. The film becomes tangibly more fun whenever he’s on screen, though after the first act, when Hig wanders away from their compound, he’s in much shorter supply.
The film also loosens up a bit when Pearce appears as the weathered rancher Pops; his emotional narrative about parenting in the end times is at least as interesting as anything happening among the younger folks. Sci-fi staple Benedict Wong does the most with his brief, engaging screen time as a welcoming Mennonite farmer, and Alison Janney gives her all to a cameo that seems ripped from an entirely different, much stranger (and possibly more interesting) film.
And the scenery itself is its own character, rendered in gorgeous, sweeping shots by Oscar-winning cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt. A frequent collaborator of David Fincher, Messerschmidt trades the traditional desert landscapes of Western cinema for a vision of the American West filled with towering, verdant mountains, as beautiful as it is forlorn (yes, these scenes were actually shot in Italy instead of Colorado — but what’s more classic Western than shooting Italy as if it were the American West?). Similarly, Hig’s silent wandering through the charred ruins of Denver, which is now overrun by ownerless dogs, or his airborne returns to his isolated mountain hideout, evoke the loneliness and freedom of life as a survivor better than any dialogue. A few sudden, wordless, violent moments — one involving a stampeding herd of buffalo, the other a stampeding herd of humans — genuinely shock and instantly raise the film’s stakes. And scenes where Hig flies his Cessna over hills and valleys filled with wandering animals, or around mountains that predate the dawn of humanity, make one of the film’s strongest points: that any belief that we are masters of the universe is false. The world was here before us, and it will remain after us. All we have is deciding how to live while we’re here now.
It’s tough to watch The Dog Stars without thinking of The Road, another film about trying to hold on to your love and humanity as the world collapses. The Road is both a much harder watch and a much better film, but the two share a core message that lurks at the heart of any truly engaging post-apocalyptic art: that in tough times, many people will think they have to jettison love and their humanity to survive. But in fact, those are the only things that make survival worthwhile.
In The Dog Stars’ third act, some unexpected twists (and some slightly too-on-the-nose dialogue) introduce a new message, one that feels a bit fresher and of-the-moment: that an obsession with the past precludes hope for the future, and thus will destroy us. Hig’s unresolved grief nearly kills him; other characters allow their present lives to curdle while they fixate on what has been lost. And the film’s primary antagonists, a group of strange marauders, seem to have become so detached from hope for the future that they have literally regressed back through time, sporting body paint while riding horseback and wielding bows and arrows. An inability to move forward, the movie hints, can be as deadly as any disease.
The Dog Stars only fully comes together near its conclusion, when the fighting and adventures of the previous 90-plus minutes suddenly click into place as a new way of looking at the world. But the clarity of the end only serves to further highlight the many moments of clunky confusion that preceded it. The Dog Stars isn’t a popcorn movie that will help you pass the final days of summer in a state of air-conditioned escapism; it also isn’t the kind of think-y sci-fi where the extraordinary circumstances are mostly just a set-up for the characters to discuss their feelings. Instead, it’s an awkward marriage of the two, with a little something to please everybody, but a whole that will likely only genuinely thrill a few. Still, the film’s optimism ultimately keeps it from ever turning into a slog. It’s tough to stay positive after the end of the world. But according to The Dog Stars, in times of crisis, it’s the most valuable resource we have.
