Not a Very Good Boy
Ridley Scott is on record saying he can make these “with my eyes closed.” It shows.
The Dog Stars
Director: Ridley Scott • Writer: Mark L Smith, based on the book by Peter Heller
Starring: Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce
UK / USA • 1hr 58mins
Opens Hong Kong August 27 • IIB
Grade: C
When was the last time a film by Oscar-nominated, science fiction trailblazer (Alien) Ridley Scott, who single-handedly defined the future in cinema (Blade Runner) and 1990s feminism (Thelma & Louise), and who continued to work even after laying the turkey that was The Counselor, flew under the radar, frequent flights into fist-shaking crank aside? Well, The Dog Stars has, and that may have something to do with its poster art, the first line of any movie’s defence. Look at it. I’ll wait… If you typed a prompt for a post-apocalyptic sci-fi survival thriller, in which nature was reclaiming our urban spaces and the remnants of humanity regressed into semi-feral, feuding tribes into an AI you might get this. And it would be Grok. Because everybody is white. So, yeah. Grok.
Let’s keep the story details brief. In 2035 mechanic and pilot dude Hig (Jacob Elordi) lives with his dog Jasper and his ex-Marine pal Bangley (Josh Brolin) on an abandoned airstrip in the aftermath of a devastating pandemic. He flies an old high wing Cessna to Denver for supply runs and mopes about his dead wife. There’s always a dead wife. When things turn even shittier he heads out for Grand Junction, following the voice he hears on the radio, that being the community’s leader, Darlene (poor Allison Janney). He’s joined by a medic, Cima (Margaret Qualley), who he met when he crashed near her farm, and Cima’s father, innovatively named Pops (poor Guy Pearce). There are feral folk to be wary of.
Anything happens to that dog…
The Dog Stars was based on kayaker (!) and outdoorsy type Peter Heller’s 2012 (peak apocalyptica right there) novel, which Scott has been sitting on for some time, and which by all accounts is a “a dark, poetic and funny novel,” and a brutal one. That may be (didn’t read it) but the film Scott turned out is an amalgam of every single end times survival thriller to come down the pipe since the first blasted, diseased wastelands of Isaac Asimov, Mary Shelley and John Brunner. Screenwriter Mark L Smith adapted the book, and he was a good choice given his deft illustrations of our natural world as a threat – he wrote The Revenant, Twisters, Netflix series American Primeval – and credit (I guess?) to him for stuffing all the tropes of what is now an unshakeable sub-genre into the stew: A killer virus (The Last of Us, 28 Days/Weeks/Years Later, The Stand), the new world trying to recapture the glories of mid-century design (Fallout), the brutality and isolation of The Road and finally a very good boy (A Boy and His Dog, I Am Legend, Mad Max). There are vines growing all over our past temples to advanced civilisation, empty streets dotted with scrub. It’s an instantly recognisable aesthetic (the other being bleached desert) and one that is utterly devoid of significance when there’s no struggle to invest in, no character to connect to. Hig is unknowable outside of his love for Jasper, his self-pity and his suicidal tendencies – which fully explored would have been a spectacular narrative backbone. Smith either doesn’t care about Hig’s internal life or Elordi simply can’t project it. He’s running on one note here, and he’s running the risk of self-banishment to sullen, entitled bro status if he doesn’t prove he can, indeed, project emotional nuance. So it’s no surprise that Brolin and Pearce spice things up when they muscle in with their gun-nut and protective dad routines and it’s a shame they didn’t get any time together. Let’s see that movie. Oh, Qualley is… a girl.
But the now familiar spiral into savagery – which is always coded as indigenous too for added grossness – is starting to flirt with numbing precept, and if you’re going to go down this road you had best build a world and a story we can buy into, that won’t make me want to stand up in the cinema and shout “Antibiotics have expiry dates, dumb ass!” Way to take a viewer out of the movie. Same goes for gasoline. Must Amish and Mennonites (more coding, this time pious) communities be reduced to vindicated quaintness and idyllic outposts, like Aaron’s (Asian person alert, Benedict Wong) bean farm? Is the “feral bandit” penchant for trashing everything in a world of limited resources really the way to go? And why must all pregnant women sit by open fucking windows all day? When we should be pondering Hig’s urge to be better and shirk violence, when we should be chewing over what kind of society shoots first and asks questions later, when we should be contemplating the fragility of social order (all buried in there) we’re instead wondering who’s manning the (still working) power grid, unless we already gave ourselves to the AI overlords? Those are acceptable hand-waving bits when the guts of the story are so engaging and new you let them go (see: above). This simply isn’t new anymore.
As a final kick in the teeth Scott’s usual flair is all but absent in The Dog Stars. Every scene feels like a functional establishing shot rather than a dense and boggling painting Scott can compose when he feels like it; seriously check out the criminally underseen The Last Duel. There’s no language here, no light and shadow work and so it looks ready for Netflix. It’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s just there. I’d rather it was utter dog shite.