“The Dog Stars” Runs on Fumes

Following the devastating news of Dolly Parton and Tim Curry passing away on the very same day, I walked into Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars the following afternoon desperately needing a distraction. The simultaneous departure of two towering cultural icons who offered decades of comfort, camp, and warmth left a distinct, heavy ache in the body. Sinking into the dark of a theater for a postapocalyptic thriller from a director known for massive scale felt like the right move. But instead of delivering the kind of transportive story that lets a viewer forget the outside world for two hours, the film completely stalls out. It trades genuine cinematic ambition for repetitive routines, thin genre tropes, and a narrative that fails to find its emotional center.

Fabio Lovino/20th Century Studios

Adapted from Peter Heller’s 2012 novel by screenwriter Mark L. Smith, The Dog Stars exchanges the usual mud-drenched misery of the genre for a quiet, pastoral survival routine. Audiences meet Hig (Jacob Elordi), a civilian pilot navigating a world emptied out by a flu pandemic. He spends his days mowing an airstrip, fly-fishing, and flying his Cessna with his dog, Jasper.

Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt has built a career on stark visual precision, bringing deliberate compositions to projects like David Fincher’s Mank and The Killer. Here, Messerschmidt captures plenty of sweeping vistas, but the movie quickly reveals its biggest structural flaw—it is painfully dull.

The film operates at two speeds: an excruciatingly slow crawl through aimless routines and sterile dialogue that leave you checking your watch, jarringly punctuated by intense, high-octane action set pieces that feel pulled from an entirely different movie. Hig spends scene after scene in the cockpit gliding over uniform landscapes, which are undeniably beautiful on their own, even if the sharp eye will notice these rugged American Rockies were filmed in Italy. Where Messerschmidt’s framing usually creates tension, here it feels like procedural filler meant to stretch the run time. The visual scope loses its punch through sheer overuse; checking my notes after the screening, I had logged no fewer than seven separate flying montages. Even if Ridley Scott intended this repetition to immerse us in Hig’s quiet isolation, it simply fails to earn our continuing attention, and no amount of pretty mountain shots can mask how tedious the experience becomes.

Fabio Lovino/20th Century Studios

Early on, the narrative grounds itself at Hig’s hangar home to focus on his coinhabitant, Bangley (Josh Brolin). Bangley is a walking collection of survivalist clichés. He is the quintessential “shoot first, ask questions never” ex-marine who refers to desperate scavengers as “roaches” and justifies killing anyone who gets close. Given Scott’s long history of dissecting the complexities and moral costs of violence, I was genuinely surprised to watch him steer this narrative toward repeatedly validating Bangley’s lethal isolationism as heroic. While the script bears much of the blame for flattening these dynamics into lazy tropes, Scott lets it happen, allowing a grim, unexamined stand-your-ground fantasy to serve as the film’s moral core.

Worse still is how the film handles its outside threats across the board, representing one of its most baffling departures from Heller’s source material. Mark L. Smith previously demonstrated a knack for visceral, high-stakes wilderness survival with The Revenant and Overlord—projects defined by relentless brutality in which human desperation feels grounded in raw, unforgiving environments. While those scripts use extreme violence to push characters to their absolute physical and moral limits, Smith’s approach here feels misplaced. Rather than using harsh survival conditions to test the integrity of these men, the script defaults to validating Bangley’s ruthless ethos as the only practical way to live. In Heller’s novel, the survivors outside Hig and Bangley’s perimeter are portrayed as complex and tragic figures operating out of sheer desperation. The movie throws that nuance out the window.

Fabio Lovino/20th Century Studios

The story hints at actual worldbuilding when Hig documents unique symbols and strange markings left on buildings during his Denver supply runs, teasing a distinct culture or language among the survivors. That intrigue is completely abandoned. Instead, the nighttime raiders Bangley faces are reduced to a wild, tattoo-covered horde whose sole purpose is to be mowed down in a blaze of action-movie excess. To its credit, the sequence delivers a genuinely fun visual trick—using night-vision green to make blood splatter pop against the dark—but I saw it as a stylish gimmick over substance.

Later, when Hig encounters a different group of marauders, the production defaults to lazy, xenophobic shorthand, styling them with face paint, mohawks, and horseback charges. The odd visual choice plays like a misplaced, racially charged 1950s Western trope. By flattening all outside survivors into violent, primitive caricatures, the film relies on an uncritical us-versus-them nativist fantasy that feels glaringly out of touch. Rather than interrogating the paranoia of isolationism, the narrative validates Bangley’s instinct that anyone outside the fence is a subhuman threat deserving of immediate execution. It transforms a survival story into an ugly fortress-mentality parable, where empathy is framed as a deadly flaw and the “other” is stripped of basic human dignity just to give the heroes something guilt-free to target.

When Hig finally takes to the sky to chase a faint radio signal, which in turn leads him toward an isolated father and daughter, Pops (Guy Pearce) and Cima (Margaret Qualley), the film briefly attempts to pivot toward human connection. Having admired the soulful humanity Elordi brought to Frankenstein’s creature in Guillermo del Toro‘s production as well as his sultry, brooding take on Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (divisive as that film was), I was genuinely eager to see how he would anchor a grounded, slow-burn survival story. Unfortunately, the slowly building romantic tension between him and Qualley completely fizzles out. It is difficult to say whether the flat dynamic stems from Elordi still finding his feet in this specific mode of understated leading-man performance or if it simply traces back to the script’s clunky, sparse dialogue. Qualley, who proved how magnetic and fearless she can be in The Substance, brings a welcome spark to the screen, but the screenplay gives her frustratingly little material to work with in terms of meaningful plot or character development.

Fabio Lovino/20th Century Studios

Then comes Grand Junction, and the monotony is shattered by sheer tonal whiplash. I will not say much here to avoid spoilers, but I was baffled by this shift in story. What starts as an unsettling, retro-esque paradise suddenly detours into hyperstylized dark satire, complete with a wildly eccentric cameo by Allison Janney. From my seat in the theater, it was an incredibly jarring right turn, a darkly surreal detour dropped directly into the third act of a slow-burn survival drama, leaving the resolution feeling rushed and haphazard.

The Dog Stars fails to unite its technical elements into a satisfying whole. Messerschmidt’s camera work has occasional majesty, but the visuals lack any real emotional weight. I place that void squarely at the feet of Smith’s underwritten script rather than the cast; even capable performers like Elordi and Brolin are left adrift, given little more to work with than thin tropes and sterile exposition. Meanwhile, Harry Gregson-Williams’s score leans far too heavily on repetitive, basic folksy tunes that grow grating after the third flight sequence, doing little to lift the film out of its slump. These pieces never connect into the grand cinematic vision we know Ridley Scott can deliver.

This film remains a postapocalyptic journey that never truly takes off, grounded by tedious pacing, cliché characterizations, a weak screenplay, and deeply problematic tropes.