★★★☆☆
Ridley Scott’s latest blockbuster, The Dog Stars, is a movie which has so much to say, yet chooses to say barely anything at all. After a virus wipes out most of humanity, survivalists spend their days getting by while fighting off the threat of a rabid, feral mob known as “survivors”.
Jacob Elordi’s Hig is the soft mannered yin to Josh Brolin’s yang, but their companionship is never convincing. In pursuit of a better life, Hig leaves Brolin’s Bangley behind at their compound, meeting Margaret Qualley’s Cima and Guy Pearce’s Pops when his plane lands in the Colorado forest. Despite initial apprehension from Pops, Higs and Cima grow close, and it’s this chemistry between Elordi and Qualley which helps keep the movie alive. Without this, The Dog Stars struggles to be emotionally compelling. There’s a distinct emptiness to most of the characters in this movie, with any character building largely absent.
85% of The Dog Stars is just Elordi, Brolin, Qualley and Pearce living their lives in the wilderness, interacting with one another while pondering over what could be out there. To its credit, the scenery and cinematography are two of the movie’s strong points. Swathes of forests and lakes help hammer home how empty the world is, and a side plot featuring a family or mormons also showcases the human side of Hig.
For a post-apocalyptic survival thriller, there is a significant lack of thrill. The survivors never feel like much of a threat, even when fifty of them ambush the compound. The only exciting part of the movie occurs when Hig and co. arrive at the Grand Junction airstrip, in hope of meeting fellow survivalists. What they encounter instead is far from sanity. The entire sequence is eerie, unsettling and tense, and it’s a shame that nothing else in The Dog Stars feels this urgent.
The Dog Stars’ biggest flaw is that it should never have been positioned as a survival thriller – there just isn’t enough action and suspense to warrant this. Instead, it feels more like a post-apocalyptic drama. Had Ridley Scott honed in on the emotional side of the story, The Dog Stars would have been more compelling. Instead, it feels like he doesn’t quite know what kind of movie he wants to make. He flirts with several ideas across 118 laboured minutes, never finding one that sticks. It’s not bad, but it just never quite scratches that itch. It’s too toothless to be an action thriller, but too emotionally hollow to make you feel something.
This review has been adapted from Jack Parker’s Letterboxd profile.
