Review: THE DOG STARS

 by Rob DiCristino

The dog dies. I’m just telling you right away.

No one makes major motion pictures quite like Sir Ridley Scott. He wouldn’t let them. If they tried, he’d get very angry and throw things. There would be cigar fires and racial slurs. But that’s just Ridley being Ridley. That’s why we love him! The legendary English auteur is one of our last cinematic stalwarts, an old-school craftsman who wholeheartedly refuses to adapt to these changing times. No matter their genre or budget, Ridley Scott’s films are bold and exuberant; even scripts that would be understated dramas in the hands of other filmmakers become colorful romps when brought to life by Ragin’ Ridley. Is this kind of maximalism always the right approach? I don’t know, friend; do you like listening to Oscar-winning actors adopt preposterous Italian accents? Haven’t you ever wanted to see Ray Liotta eat his own brains? Wouldn’t it be cool if a robot Michael Fassbender made out with another, identical robot Michael Fassbender? Subtlety is for cowards. Ridley Scott’s films are rarely perfect, but no one would dare accuse them of being predictable.

So I’ll admit to being surprised to hear that Ridley’s next project after the ostentatious Gladiator II — you do remember the ostentatious Gladiator II, don’t you? — would be The Dog Stars, an adaptation of Peter Heller’s 2012 post-apocalyptic novel of the same name. It’s not that I didn’t think Ridley Scott could stage a sleepy post-apocalypse; it’s just that the story of a taciturn mechanic (Jacob Elordi as Hig) wandering the ruins of Denver with his trusty canine companion felt a tad mundane for a guy who typically deals in more overstated — more “destiny has brought me this lambchop”-type — dramaturgy. Nevertheless, the first hour of The Dog Stars introduces us to Hig’s broken world, a rusty stretch of mountain valley he shares with ex-Marine Bangley (Josh Brolin). Their home is a fortified airstrip, and Hig passes the time between recon flights searching the ruins of downtown and bringing supplies to a Mennonite camp led by Aaron (Benedict Wong). His mind often drifts to his late wife (Sai Bennett), who was taken by the virus that destroyed the world.

It’s a peaceful enough way to survive, but when a band of raiders invades the airstrip and kills his beloved pooch, Jasper — I already told you the dog doesn’t make it; don’t yell at me — Hig decides to get busy living or get busy dying. He sets out west in search of a promised land where humans are able to rise above their baser survival instincts and live together in harmony. He soon stumbles upon Pops (Guy Pearce) and his daughter, Cima (Margaret Qualley), a pair of farmers whose early suspicions eventually give way to exactly the sort of trust and cooperation Hig had in mind. For a while, it seems like The Dog Stars will be the story of a man who refuses to give into the cynicism and xenophobia that keeps the militant Bangley camped alone behind his barricades. Hig and the widowed Cima fall for each other quickly — Pops makes a valiant effort to referee, but no loving father would deny his daughter a roll in the hay with Jacob Elordi — and he starts to seriously consider the possibility of a better world born out of the ashes of the one that we once destroyed.

And while Ridley Scott succeeds in presenting that destroyed world with an authentic grime and grittiness that other filmmakers would outsource to CGI — including the kind of breathtaking airplane photography we rarely get these days unless Tom Cruise is hanging off the damn wings — The Dog Stars takes a series of dramatic second-half turns that confuse and complicate its narrative so severely that it never quite recovers. What begins as a quiet cousin to The Last of Us or Station Eleven goes full Bong Joon Ho in a sequence featuring Allison Janney as a Stepford-esque cult leader, and a nighttime raid on Bangley’s compound by a group of migrant-coded “roaches” muddles any messages Mark L. Smith’s screenplay might be trying to communicate about the power of charity and empathy. Those could very well be passages straight from Heller’s novel, for all I know, but a filmmaker as talented as Ridley Scott should be better at spinning his tonal plates, and there’s a real shoulder-shrugging quality to the way they all come crashing to the ground.

That’s not to say there isn’t some fun to be had in The Dog Stars: Jacob Elordi has more than proven his ability to carry a picture at this point in his career, and he has an easy, lived-in chemistry with Margaret Qualley that presents a thoughtful picture of finding new love in the wake of grief and loss. Guy Pearce and Josh Brolin are leaning into their gruff, grey-bearded elder statesmen stages with delightful enthusiasm — a shot of a half-naked Brolin near the end gives the film its one and only genuine comedy beat — and even though Scott denies us a needed meeting between these two cantankerous codgers, their mere presence lends The Dog Stars the gravitas it desperately requires in its weaker, duller moments. Still, it’s hard not to wonder at Ridley Scott’s 2020s decline — the underrated Last Duel aside — and question whether he’d be better off burning out than fading away. Scott’s the kind of guy who will die making movies, and I’ll be there for every one of them. But a few more like The Dog Stars, and it’s going to get hard to convince anyone to join me.

The Dog Stars hits U.S. theaters on Friday, August 28th.