The Dog Stars is ruff for all the wrong reasons

The Dog Stars protagonist Hig (Jacob Elordi) endures a challenging existence. Not because of the dystopian future he now navigates every day. Instead, he and audiences must suffer through another shrug-worthy late-period Ridley Scott directorial effort. Alas, the helmer behind The Martian, The Last Duel, and Alien has now delivered another snoozer more reminiscent of Gladiator II and Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Now that a pandemic has wiped out the world, Hig spends his days in tattered Denver, Colorado with his canine pal Jasper flying his yellow plane around, collaborating with gunfire-prone Bangley (Josh Brolin), and fending off violent "roaches," survivors of the apocalypse. Feeling despondent, Hig takes a chance and steers his aircraft towards his dream destination: Grand Junction. Bangley isn’t so sure this location either exists or is hospitable. However, Hig must take a chance and venture out into the world. Along his journey, he encounters and gradually bonds with Cima (Margaret Qualley) and her hostile father, Pops (Guy Pearce).

Hig first encounters these characters when he’s spying on Cima working on her farm. Suddenly, a gun’s cocked. “Put your weapon down!” a voice calls out. This is how Pops and Hig first meet. It’s easy to imagine this interaction playing out effectively visually. The camera would pull back to reveal the shotgun’s barrel but never cut away from this jeopardized character. Eventually, audiences would only get a good look at Pops when the Dog Stars protagonist turns around. This could instill tension (“whose that holding the gun?!?”) while subliminally using the camera to simulate Hig’s perspective.

Instead, Scott and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt awkwardly cut to a medium shot of Pops right after he begins threatening Hig. The camera doesn’t simulate Hig’s point-of-view nor does its position say something about Pops (like a low-angle shot accentuating his intimidating nature). It’s just the same rudimentary camera angle Dog Stars keeps opting for. Scott’s Gladiator II inability to frame two characters in the same shot persist here. The Dog Stars is a movie full of inert visuals lacking specificity or personality. Even the cuts between scenes are awkward.

In a summer where low-budget movies like Obsession, It Ends, and Color Book have exhibited immense visual flair, the costly tentpole The Dog Stars radiating downright amateurish imagery is insulting. This flaw also provides a barrier between the audience and the characters. Hig, for instance, is suicidal and dreams of crashing his plane into a Telluride mountain. A superior movie would’ve reflected this harrowing desire through evocative imagery. Instead, Elordi just mumbles about this urge in flatly realized conversation sequences.

Similarly shabbily realized is Hig’s sorrow over his deceased wife. The only times audiences see this character, she’s pregnant, sitting in a bedroom, wearing a perfect bathrobe, and draped in billowing curtains. This "dead girlfriend" imagery isn’t just groan-inducingly familiar and a barrier to get invested in these characters. It also deprives The Dog Stars of any chance to establish an idiosyncratic identity. This flaw fails both audiences and the mindsets of the principal Dog Stars players.

The only time this movie truly comes alive is in a third act detour involving Allison Janney as a community leader who dresses like a 50s airline stewardess. The more pronounced creative choices in this Dog Stars segment (including the array of people wearing different period era clothes) is a welcome reprieve from the Temu Last of Us shenanigans otherwise populating the film. Plus, Janney’s kooky work is more specific than Brolin doing a pastiche of his other grizzled “man of the land” characters. This set piece is over way too quickly. However, it at least provides a jolt of life to an otherwise monotonous affair.

When it isn’t boring, The Dog Stars bizarrely falls back on weird, racially uncomfortable hallmarks to define the film’s primary bad guys. The two packs of violent post-apocalypse survivors Hig and Bangley contend with are a cornucopia of troublesome dog-whistles. One group is covered in tattoos (how EEEEVIL), bald, and speaks in an unrecognizable non-English language. The other is a slew of horseback-riding foes clearly evoking indigenous Americans, right down to their face paint and use of tomahawks in battle. The Dog Stars is so bereft of imagination that it’s rehashing dehumanizing indigenous American stereotypes from 50s Westerns.

Naturally, only white men with guns adhering to “traditional” living can “protect” their land and property from these forces. Amusingly, this cringe-inducing plot element exists in a story that still supports vaccines and deferring to medical professionals on diseases. In other words, the racially toxic Dog Stars material may lure some right-wing viewers in, but other core plot elements will repel them. That’s a microcosm of how this dreary affair is a movie for nobody. Action fans will only get three brief “fight” sequences over a 120-minute runtime. Jacob Elordi aficionados surely prefer him in less tedious productions.

Even devotees to grim cinema (like yours truly) will uncover none of the depth or evocative imagery from Come and See or Lynne Ramsay’s various masterpieces here. The Dog Stars frowns heavily, but that’s all its “bleak” atmosphere amounts to. Not even deeply talented performers like Jacob Elordi or Guy Pearce can imbue layers into this slog. Ridley Scott’s autopilot filmmaking instincts are an albatross The Dog Stars never escapes.