Director Ridley Scott will be 89 years old in November, so excuse us if our first question regarding his latest, The Dog Stars, is not whether it works (it mostly does) or whether Jacob Elordi is any good (he mostly is), but rather how it all fits into Scott’s legendary career. The movie is certainly his best since 2015’s The Martian, a story about head-down, get-it-done, workmanlike problem-solving that probably appealed to such a pragmatic director. Why Peter Heller’s novel, The Dog Stars, spoke to Scott to such a degree that he was compelled to make a movie version is hard to say. It’s rare to see Scott in any sort of hopeful mood, but maybe that’s age chipping away at his famously gruff, cigar-chomping exterior. If Scott, who has never won a competitive Oscar, is too masculine a director to completely win us over emotionally, The Dog Stars succeeds as an effective, minor-key post-apocalyptic drama about risk and renewal.
The movie is about as close as the prolific Scott has ever gotten to making a mood piece. It establishes its tone early with Hozier’s earthy ballad “Like Real People Do,” while Harry Gregson-Williams’ earnest acoustic score reminds us that there’ll be no aliens bursting out of any chests in this one, although there certainly will be blood.
After a flu wipes out most of humanity, many survivors huddle in isolated countryside encampments and keep a tight perimeter to guard against the constant threat of feral marauders desperate for food. And even when the threat is realized and the film starts looking like a pastiche of 28 Days Later, The Last of Us, and The Road Warrior, Scott and editors Sam Restivo and Claire Simpson are so committed to the bit that they rarely push things into thrill-ride territory. If that’s disappointing, well, that’s an audience-expectation problem, because Scott is steadfast in maintaining a slow, sure hand, which does yield the humble rewards Scott is shooting for.
Even though Heller’s novel was released in 2012, you don’t have to close your eyes very tightly to imagine the film as a worst-case-scenario endgame for COVID-19. In fact, that twinge of painful recognition when the forehead thermometer comes out is very real. The pandemic seems to have split the world into two: there are the rotted, crumbling husks of what used to be cities (production designer Chris Seagers does great work here) and the fog-enshrouded compounds in the country, where former mechanic Hig (Jacob Elordi) has been riding out the apocalypse with his closest human companion, Bangley (Josh Brolin).
20th Century Studios
The Revenant screenwriter Mark L. Smith gently and repeatedly makes the case that Bangley represents an older generation that trusts no one—not that he doesn’t have a case. Bangley is a shoot-first kinda guy who kills scavengers on sight with a high-powered rifle from half a klick away, after which he burns their bodies. Hig is more the openhearted sort, sleeping outdoors, tending to his garden, and flying to Denver in his rickety (but somehow indestructible) Cessna to gather supplies and sit pensively on the bed of his well-preserved home to grieve his late wife. Getting us to care about whether humanity can survive all this comes down to Elordi, whose wounded-emo performance mixes Bruce Dern’s astronaut botanist in Silent Running with Charlton Heston’s heroic military scientist in The Omega Man. But he does make a clear foil to the terrific Brolin as the deeply suspicious and heavily armed survivalist with a welcome sense of acerbic humor.
Scott eases us into the story not to lull us into complacency until the fireworks shock us awake, but because this is how life would unfold in such a desolate world punctuated by violence. Things finally kick into gear when Hig abandons Bangley to track down the source of a distant radio transmission. Scott, who has never made a Western, comes surprisingly close after Hig’s Cessna conks out early in his search, and he stumbles upon a ranch where Cima (Margaret Qualley) lives with her father, Pops (Guy Pearce, finding new and creative ways to look disapprovingly at Elordi). The pair embodies the same generational divide as Hig and Bangley, with Pops representing distrust and Cima, who also lost her spouse in the pandemic, serving as Hig’s somewhat too neatly drawn emotional counterpart. As the two tear up trees to clear a runway for the Cessna, Cima wears progressively less clothing until her denim shorts make it pretty clear where all this is headed.
When the bullets do fly, it’s no surprise that Scott delivers muscular and tense scenes, including an invasion of Bangley’s compound. When Hig, Cima, and Pops finally trace the radio transmission to its source at a local airport (run by a makeup-smothered Allison Janney), the action may be bizarre and a bit improbable, but the point is made: The Dog Stars is about hope, but it’s mostly about how hope cannot be found without risk. Leaving the dehumanizing safety of his compound, flying into the unknown in search of human connection, and opening up to Cima about the grief of losing his wife are all risks Hig takes once he realizes that merely surviving is not enough.
Maybe the director of Gladiator and Black Hawk Down had to be pushing 90 before he was ready to send us such a humanist message. Although that message is not exactly loud, and maybe not that clear, it shows that the old dog still has new things to say and new ways to say them.
- Release Date
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August 28, 2026
- Runtime
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119 minutes
- Writers
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Mark L. Smith
