“I never want to repeat myself, and all my films have been on the money,” said Sir Ridley Scott, promoting his new film, The Dog Stars. “I’ve been ahead of the game frequently, and if you’re ahead of the game, you’re an influencer. So I’m not a filmmaker, I’m an influencer.”
This quote is certainly on the money, insofar as it exemplifies its source’s robust—some might say megalomaniacal—sense of self-regard. If there’s one prerequisite for any filmmaker determined to produce mega-budget epics at regular intervals for 50 years, it’s a healthy ego. At 88, Sir Ridley is in fighting trim. He’s always good for a quote; the press tours for Napoleon and Gladiator II were exponentially more entertaining than the plodding, pachydermatous movies that they were attached to. Scott has his champions among the auteurist set, but his legacy is more set as an industrial-strength craftsman than a vanguard artist. He’s got a keen eye and the instincts of an adman; his default mode is in the hard sell. With this in mind, his comment indicates something more than brand-name bravado; beneath the bluster, you can hear a veteran pro’s anxieties about wanting to remain in the conversation.
The leads of The Dog Stars could not be more Instagram-ready. Jacob Elordi and Margaret Qualley are authentic Gen-Z A-listers, and well matched as romantic leads. The postapocalyptic setting of Scott’s film, adapted from Peter Heller’s 2012 bestseller about the ravages of a global influenza, positions the characters as the last hope for humankind, the long and lanky duo who might just repopulate the world with giraffe-like children. To the extent that there’s an influencer vibe here, it’s a reactionary one. It’s a curiously—and perhaps unconsciously—trad-coded blockbuster, suffused with longing for both bygone movie genres (it’s got the pacing and iconography of an old-school Western) and an analog way of life. Despite the 2035 dateline and armory’s worth of sophisticated weaponry—necessary accessories for good guys trying to hack it in bad times—The Dog Stars glances backward; its future-shock setup belies a yearning for the cozy comforts of yesteryear.
The idea that the end of the world as we know it might paradoxically return us to the primal scene is not exactly novel. Just last year, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland did a brilliant job of collapsing together various eras of British history into the numinous ruins of 28 Years Later; even more recently, David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street mulched together Reagan-era Americana and Cretaceous flora and fauna to fertilize a sly allegory about our perpetual proximity to extinction.
Scott is not breaking new ground so much as hovering over it. The Dog Stars opens with a series of breathtaking aerial shots that map the fallout of a plague that stopped humanity in its tracks. The hollowed-out labyrinth where the camera finally comes to rest is Denver, or what’s left of it; an image of the local basketball arena, its electronic signage still flickering faintly decades after the final buzzer, makes one wonder if Nikola Jokić made it out alive.
We’re never told what caused the
outbreak, or why a small portion of the population survived; Scott is an adroit
enough visual storyteller that the lack of outright exposition doesn’t matter.
The opening section of The Dog Stars is, in its way, rather gorgeous,
and reinforces Scott’s status as a master of landscapes, especially when seen
from a godlike remove: Think of the lunar vistas of Thelma and Louise, or
the charbroiled ziggurats adorning Blade Runner. His hushed tableaus of a fallen metropolis evoke journalist Alan Weisman’s 2007 thought experiment, The World Without Us: “The Earth holds ghosts, even of
entire nations.” Scott’s images are loquacious and even eloquent; the film’s
problems begin when the characters open their mouths.
“Civilization’s mask had to come off for you to see it,” snarls Bangley (Josh Brolin), an ex-Marine living on a sprawling, heavily fortified ranch a few clicks from the city on the other side of Colorado’s towering Front Range. He’s talking to—or at—his fellow survivor Hig (Elordi), a mechanic and civilian pilot who’s determined to keep up appearances. Bangley’s worldview basically boils down to shoot first and ask questions later; his rhetoric is as steady as his trigger finger. Hig, though, is compelled to turn the other cheek; during one of his regular flights into town to gather supplies and pay respects at the graveside of his late wife—who died from the flu a few months after suffering a miscarriage—he spares a crossbow-wielding stranger who’s fixing to mow him down. Hig is handy with a wrench and a rifle and makes a good beef stew; his real superpower, though, is optimism. He holds fast to the idea that somewhere beyond the Rockies, there’s a brave new world, or maybe a remnant of the old one; he’s even potentially willing to fly away in search of it.
That anguished wanderlust kicks into high gear after a failed raid on the compound by a cabal of Gothy marauders seemingly on loan from Cormac McCarthy. (An alternate title for Heller’s nicely written but derivative source novel could have been: The Middle of the Road.) That bloody nighttime siege leaves Bangley and Hig unscathed but results in the death of the latter’s beloved dog Jasper—his co-pilot, traveling companion, and comfort animal. (The film’s title refers to a constellation named in the pooch’s image.) In the book, Hig’s pal was an Australian cattle dog, but it seems Bluey has cornered the pop-culture market on Heelers; the trio of Belgian Malinois deployed to play Jasper have true star wattage.
Jasper’s demise robs the movie of its most appealing presence; Elordi’s puppy-dog eyes are a poor substitute. Hig decides to fly away, and Bangley—always a pragmatist—offers him a going-away present in the form of a bag of grenades, which he advises should be dropped from a great height. (Somewhere, the ghost of Anton Chekhov is smiling wryly.) Our hero’s vision quest doesn’t go smoothly; he’s downed by a leaky fuel tank and nearly flattened upon landfall by a stampede of CGI buffalo. His salvation arrives in the form of Cima (Qualley), who materializes out of the woods the very picture of a homesteader, clad fetchingly in denim and trailing her very own pet donkey.
Cima lives on a secluded farm of her own with her Pops, who’s actually named Pops and played beneath a bushy beard by Guy Pearce. (Like Brolin, Pearce is too good for this but he gives good coot all the same; his reaction to being offered his first cigarette in decades is sweetly funny.) Cima’s also handy with a wrench and a rifle, and skillful with a skillet; she has a wedding ring and a sob story to rival her visitor’s. “You aren’t the only one who’s grieving,” she yelps, a few evenings into their outdoorsy courtship, after Hig rebuffs her advances in his sleeping bag. Meanwhile, back on the (other) ranch, Bangley sips scotch and makes a series of lonely preparations to repel yet another round of intruders, prompting us to wonder if Hig is going to finally kiss Cima (or Pops) and then fix his plane in time to fly back and save his buddy.
For a movie set in a wasteland, The Dog Stars is cluttered with plot points and symbolic gimmicks; the pileup distracts from the fact that it isn’t really about anything at all. When Scott gets a good script, like the one for 2021’s The Last Duel, he’s a percussive storyteller, but he doesn’t have the sort of curiosity to push through or against subpar material. His much-vaunted professionalism is a form of detachment, and while The Dog Stars isn’t as inept and soulless as Gladiator II—a woebegone blockbuster without a single memorable shot or piece of dialogue—it treads the path of least resistance. The film moves with purpose but not urgency; screenwriter Mark H. Hall, who did the picaresque thing more successfully in The Revenant, embraces narrative and character clichés like long-lost friends.
The cringiest bits in The Dog Stars oblige Elordi and Qualley to do some meet-cute shtick as a means of goldbricking between action set pieces. And, later, a moment where Hig asks Cima to close her eyes and tenderly places a pair of headphones over her ears hints that not even the apocalypse can extinguish memories of Garden State. (Sadly, the song he plays for her isn’t up to the level of “The New Slang.”) When The Dog Stars isn’t being goofy, it’s going nuts, as in an extended, hallucinatory detour to a far-flung airport staffed by waxy psychopaths (including Alison Janney in old-timey stewardess garb). This passage is styled, for whatever reason, like the Overlook Hotel from The Shining: Call it the Executive Lounge of the Damned.
The wild tonal shift of the airport sequence is the most interesting thing about The Dog Stars. It doesn’t work in the context of the movie, but it’s a reminder that Scott is often at his best when he lets his freak flag fly: Who can forget Michael Fassbender seducing his own doppelgänger while playing a pan flute for two in Alien Covenant? (“I’ll do the fingering”). There is plenty of gratuitous violence, including a gnarly decapitation involving a propeller blade; the geysers of blood don’t alleviate the boredom. The extended scenes of Brolin mowing down feral, Mad Max–style gang-bangers through night-vision goggles recall the behind-enemy-lines firefights of Black Hawk Down (one of the most racist studio films of the twenty-first century; Quentin Tarantino loves it) and yet Scott can’t even work up that movie’s atmosphere of stark, pressurized terror.
The common denominator between the corn and carnage is the sense of journeyman on cruise control, drifting toward a coda so banal—barn dances and potlucks and contented canoodling beneath the Dog Stars—that we can’t help but lean in and squint, as if to see the quotation marks around the images, as in the director’s cut of Blade Runner. But there aren’t any. Scott’s cynicism has sometimes been his saving grace, but not here; in this case being on the money means playing strictly to the cheap seats. It’s good to know that Scott doesn’t want to repeat himself, because The Dog Stars is one of his weakest features—a slick, frictionless hymn to the endurance of the human spirit; it will itself be lost in time, like slop in rain.