The Dog Stars Looks Like Ridley Scott at His Most Elemental
Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin and Margaret Qualley lead a post-apocalyptic thriller that appears more interested in what survives the end of the world than in the end itself.
There is a version of The Dog Stars that could have looked painfully familiar. A pandemic has erased most of civilization. The survivors are armed, suspicious and scattered. The world is beautiful only because so few people are left to damage it. More than a decade of post-apocalyptic movies and television has trained audiences to recognize the machinery almost immediately.
What makes Ridley Scott's new film so intriguing is that the machinery does not seem to be the point.
The trailers for The Dog Stars sell scale, danger and the kind of hard-edged survival filmmaking Scott can do almost casually at this stage of his career. But underneath the gunfire, aircraft and empty landscapes is something quieter. Hig, played by Jacob Elordi, has survived the end of the world and still cannot convince himself that survival is enough.
That distinction is what gives the movie its potential.
Based on Peter Heller's acclaimed 2012 novel, The Dog Stars follows Hig, a pilot living at an isolated airfield with Bangley, a heavily armed survivalist played by Josh Brolin. A mysterious radio transmission gives Hig a reason to leave the security they have built and fly into territory where the possibility of finding other people is inseparable from the possibility of finding trouble.
20th Century Studios is releasing the film on August 28. Scott directs from a screenplay by Mark L. Smith, whose credits include The Revenant, and the ensemble extends well beyond Elordi and Brolin: Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, Benedict Wong and Allison Janney all appear.
The combination is almost suspiciously well matched to Scott. The director has spent much of his career placing people inside environments that seem larger, harsher and more permanent than they are. Alien turns a spaceship into an industrial maze. Blade Runner makes Los Angeles feel like a city that could keep moving forever without any one person in it. The Martian finds optimism in a place that is trying to kill its protagonist every second he is there.
The Dog Stars offers him another environment in which landscape is not background. It is pressure.
Scott has been explicit about the theatrical ambition. When the first footage was introduced around CinemaCon, he described the adaptation as something built for the big screen, and the marketing since then has backed that up. The Italian mountain locations stand in for a depopulated American West, giving the film a strange combination of postcard beauty and total absence. Wide fields, enormous ridgelines and small aircraft become part of the emotional scale of the story.
That is also why Elordi feels like an interesting choice.
His recent work has often depended on the tension between physical presence and emotional uncertainty. Hig requires both. He needs to look capable of surviving this world while still making us believe that he could risk a functioning life because a faint voice on a radio suggests there might be something more.
Brolin appears to provide the counterweight. Bangley understands the world through threat assessment: what can reach them, what can be defended, what has to be killed before it gets close. Brolin has since spoken positively about the experience of working with Scott, despite initially being unsettled by the director's unconventional, lightly rehearsed process. He ultimately described the production as one of the more creatively satisfying experiences of his career.
That is an encouraging detail because the footage does not look overly polished in the wrong way. There is scale here, but the best images have a tactile quality: worn clothes, dirty aircraft, grass moving in the wind, improvised camps and people who look as if the world has been happening to them for years.
The supporting cast suggests that the film will expand rather than simply repeat the dynamic between Hig and Bangley. Qualley's Cima, in particular, appears positioned to challenge the emotional assumptions Hig has built around isolation. The trailers reveal enough to suggest that she is part of the world Hig discovers beyond the airfield, but not enough to flatten the relationship into a conventional destination.
That restraint matters. Heller's novel works because the post-apocalypse is less interesting than the psychology of living after it. The emptiness creates room for grief, memory and the question of whether rebuilding a life is even possible when the person who survived is not the same person who existed before.
Scott does not need to reproduce the book's interior voice literally for that idea to work on screen. Flight can do some of the work. So can distance. Hig's plane is transportation, protection and temptation all at once. Every time he leaves the ground, he can see farther than the life Bangley has built for them.
There is an obvious contemporary shadow hanging over any pandemic story released now, and The Dog Stars could easily become heavy-handed if it tries to force those parallels. So far, the marketing has avoided that. The movie is being sold first as a thriller and adventure, with the larger ideas allowed to sit underneath the action rather than announcing themselves.
That seems like the right approach.
Scott's late-career output has been fascinating partly because of how little interest he appears to have in slowing down or repeating the same scale. He can make a historical epic, a crime drama and a science-fiction survival movie in quick succession without treating any of them as a ceremonial "late work." The Dog Stars looks similarly direct: a movie about a man, a plane, a dog, a survivalist and a radio signal that may or may not justify leaving safety behind.
The most promising thing about the footage is that the answer does not seem predetermined. Hig might find community. He might find violence. He will probably find both.
The question is whether wanting more than survival is an act of hope or simply another way to get yourself killed.
That is a strong question for a post-apocalyptic film. It is an even better one for Ridley Scott.
