Jacob Elordi stars as Hig in The Dog Stars. Photograph: Fabio Lovino/20th Century Studios/AP
Ridley Scott’s latest venture, The Dog Stars, arrives in cinemas this week with all the hallmarks of a prestige production: a substantial $110 million budget, adaptation of a celebrated novel, and a cast featuring Oscar nominees past and present. Yet despite these credentials, Scott’s postapocalyptic drama stumbles badly, delivering a lethargic and formulaic effort that fails to justify its epic ambitions. The film, based on Peter Heller’s 2012 source novel, chronicles a world devastated by a flu pandemic where survivors are as much a threat to each other as the harsh new reality. Jacob Elordi leads the ensemble, supported by Josh Brolin, Guy Pearce, and Margaret Qualley, yet none manage to breathe life into characters that feel tragically underdeveloped.
The Familiar Trap of Survival Cinema
It’s a subgenre drowning in its own exhaustion. Postapocalyptic survival tales have colonized our screens with such ferocity that audiences can practically script the beats themselves. The Dog Stars offers nothing to disrupt this monotony. We witness artfully dishevelled actors mourning the old world while scrambling for resources in the new one, a template we’ve absorbed countless times across television’s sprawling universes and cinema’s increasingly desperate offerings. Scott, once a master of immersive world-building, delivers instead a film that feels like watching a greatest hits collection of genre clichés, albeit one recorded in slow motion.
The cast does its earnest best with wafer-thin material. Elordi, so compelling in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, finds himself adrift here, his performance consisting largely of vacant, stoic expressions that match the film’s plodding energy. Brolin brings his trademark gruffness to Bangley, the cynical ex-marine who represents survival at any cost, while Pearce and Qualley appear as a father-daughter duo who join Hig on his journey. Yet these characters exist as archetypes rather than individuals, their motivations explained rather than revealed. Mark L Smith’s screenplay details their differences with jarring explicitness, as though the audience requires hand-holding through conversations these people would naturally have had years ago.
Visual Grandeur Can’t Mask Creative Fatigue
The scenery proves genuinely breathtaking, with rural Italy standing in for Colorado’s rugged landscape—a decision that certainly provided the production with scenic rewards. However, the visual polish cannot disguise fundamental creative problems. Some visual effects elements appear startlingly cheap, with an explosion sequence that looks uncomfortably amateurish for a production of this scale. Where exactly did the $110 million budget vanish to remains a perplexing question.
Scott’s direction here feels strangely detached, lacking the visceral intensity we’ve come to expect from a filmmaker who once commanded our attention with effortless authority. The Dog Stars unfolds with a shrug that suggests either creative exhaustion or a director whose heart resided elsewhere during production. His refusal to consider retirement is admirable in principle, but this effort suggests his passion may have checked out ahead of his schedule.
A Promising Premise, Squandered
The core narrative holds potential: a flu pandemic has decimated humanity, leaving survivors like mechanic Hig and former marine Bangley guarding their isolated Colorado compound. Their philosophical divide—Hig believing something better exists beyond their fortress, Bangley convinced survival requires ruthless pragmatism—could anchor a compelling meditation on hope and pragmatism in extremis. Instead, the film rushes toward familiar conflict when reapers arrive, introducing action sequences that feel derivative and uninspired. A third-act sequence featuring Allison Janney attempting to inject maximum intensity might have resonated more powerfully in Heller’s novel form, but on screen it registers as hollow spectacle designed to jolt rather than disturb.
The timing of this release—wedged between summer blockbusters and the autumn festival season’s prestige offerings—speaks to a studio uncertain of its product’s viability. The Dog Stars deserved better placement, though perhaps not necessarily a better fate given what reaches audiences in its current form.
Why it Matters
The critical reception of The Dog Stars carries implications beyond one film’s fortunes. Ridley Scott represents one of cinema’s last remaining titans, a director whose decades-long career has delivered consistently ambitious work even when results proved mixed. That his latest effort registers as both creatively bankrupt and commercially positioned as expendable suggests concerning questions about the current state of major studio productions. When films commanding nine-figure budgets cannot distinguish themselves from streaming fillers, audiences may reasonably question what justifies theatrical release at all. For Elordi, meanwhile, the gap between his celebrated work in horror and this underwhelming venture illustrates how star power and production value cannot compensate for fundamental storytelling failures. The Dog Stars may yet find its audience among genre completists, but as a demonstration of Scott’s continuing relevance or Hollywood’s creative health, it offers little reassurance.