Ridley Scott’s 30th feature film, dating back to his legend-making “The Duellists” in 1977, the post-apocalyptic “thriller” “The Dog Stars” isn’t a total misfire — it’s just the first Ridley Scott joint in some years that feels totally unnecessary.
In this dourly introspective adaptation of Peter Heller’s novel by screenwriter Mark L. Smith, Jacob Elordi plays a mechanic now eking out a living alongside paranoiac survivalist Josh Brolin after a viral plague wiped out most of the global population. From the South American-inflected folk textures from composer Harry Gregson-Williams to the lushly overgrown city of Erie, Colorado, now engulfed in tall grasses, “The Dog Stars” feels dubiously in the vein of “The Last of Us.” But here, there are no brain-infected fungus monsters — only lugubrious, depressed people fighting over the scraps of a lonely planet. (That Smith is the penman responsible next for Peter Berg’s upcoming World War II football drama “The Mosquito Bowl” doesn’t inspire confidence.)
One day you’re kissing your pregnant wife and playing with your dog; the next, you’re rationing supplies from a blown-out McDonald’s and rending meat with your bare hands after everything you’ve known and loved has been obliterated. That’s how we find sad-boy pilot Hig (Elordi, taking over for Paul Mescal in an instance of recasting that better serves the material) at the end of times, living in an abandoned airplane hangar with the heavily armed, world-wary ex-Marine Bangley (Brolin).
Having lost his wife Melissa (Sai Bennett) to the viral pandemic, Hig now has only his Australian cattle dog Jasper as his closest companion. Jasper, and a yellow Cessna plane Hig’s been tuning up, with ambitions to fly straight into the Telluride mountains and kill himself — because, who cares, your life is over anyway.
Supposedly posing a threat to their idyll on the outskirts are various marauding splinter groups running amok through the barren wasteland of the American Mountain West. Hig and Bangley appear to be some of the very few individuals, locally speaking, with available ammunition, but mercenaries like the face-painted, ululating, postverbal “Reapers” out of Mexico pose possibly worse threats than any firearms could.
A night vision-filtered attack on Bangley’s property feels like it should be the stuff of well-executed, precisely choreographed genius in the hands of the director of “Alien,” “Gladiator,” and even “The Last Duel.” But there’s a perverse lack of tension in any of the battle scenes that feel, for lack of a better word, gallingly random, with ultimately no bearing on the film’s emotional or story arcs other than “here’s a quickie, gory action scene for amusement,” and then onward.
Like a well-timed and — as this is a Ridley movie — requisite decapitated head in a later by-a-hair escape sequence, these set pieces are jammed in perfunctorily, with little function in what is, at the end of the day, a somber post-societal mood piece. Other than shadowy paramilitary organizations, there’s notably no government to speak of in the plague-ravaged world of “The Dog Stars” — though, like drawing patterns in the stars, the political parallels are there if you’re looking for them.
Anyway, Hig’s death wish and gravitational pull toward a mystery voice dispatching on the radio from Grand Junction lead him into the orbit of former Navy SEAL “Pops” (a grizzled Guy Pearce) and the young former medical student Cima (Margaret Qualley, whose character here, despite years of compulsory survivalism, has seemingly not missed a day of personal grooming or skin-care application). The father-daughter duo has set up shop ensconced in the woods, herding donkeys and so far evading the violence closing in on them from the outside.
“The Dog Stars” careens into a blunted romantic subplot in which Elordi and Qualley have absolutely zero chemistry, but upon which Smith’s screenplay seems to rest the future of humanity. (Other than the local Mennonites, overseen by Benedict Wong, who live without electricity and have a unique relationship to the infection.) That the film ends with the pair finally about to do it is no spoiler, but instead a macabre capper to a post-apocalyptic thriller that’s a whole lot of nothing — the heterosexuals will save us!
Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt’s work here lacks a lively spirit, which is, I suppose, in accordance with the dispirited masses who’ve been left alive on Earth. And I also suppose saying so at all is mere spin intended to retrofit what’s demonstrably a phoned-in job from the guy who won an Oscar for shooting “Mank.”
Hig, Pops (whose real name is Jack), and Cema eventually do make it to Grand Junction. They’re welcomed into an Art Deco-y, retro-futurist airport being commanded by a stewardess named Darlene, who’s played by Allison Janney, and kept in full glasses of grain alcohol by the barkeep straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” There’s something creepy and toothy about one of her other direct reports, too. Throw in a dash of bodily horror, and suddenly Hig’s descent into a pit of obvious-from-space disaster becomes the film’s most interesting sequence, with all the good and bad that interesting entails.
“You gotta have something to haunt you, right? Otherwise, you might get lonely,” Cema tells Hig as their romance starts to form (or rather, as the screenplay starts to impose it upon them). There are plenty of plaintive, platitudinous reflections on times and days gone by to put a song in your heart by the end of “The Dog Stars,” and a stent in it as well, given how frustratingly, bizarrely inert most of the running time is. You almost yearn for the post-apocalyptic movie clichés this film is so intent on resisting, or that Scott had more spring in his step after proving he’s still got muscle with “Gladiator II” and other recent action-heavy films.
Elordi’s performance is a fine one, but any emotional current from the screen to the audience is made choppy by mawkish blasts to the past, Hig at the edge of his bed, head in hands. The quiet watchfulness of Elordi and his eyes make him ever a captivating actor, but even the towering sadness of his silhouette can’t rescue material that inevitably heads straight into its own apocalypse.
Grade: C
20th Century Fox opens “The Dog Stars” in theaters starting Friday, August 28.
