The Dog Stars
The dog died pretty quickly, just like this movie.
The Dog Stars tells us a post-apocalyptic story set in 2035, after almost the entire humanity was destroyed by some kind of virus. We follow Hig, a former mechanic who lost his pregnant wife during the pandemic and now lives at an abandoned airbase in Colorado with his dog Jasper and Bangley, a former Marine. Together, they help each other stay safe from all kinds of attackers and feral people. Hig sometimes flies a small propeller plane into a nearby big city, where he looks for fuel and whatever food he can find. He also helps people living nearby in a religious community. But during one of the attacks by strangers, Jasper is killed, and Hig realizes that there is nothing left keeping him there. He dreams of something more — finding a community of people and some kind of more or less familiar real life. Along the way, he meets another family, Cima and Jack, and gets involved in a few more small adventures with them.
Overall, this movie can be described as a very fragmented piece of an apocalypse story, because Ridley Scott doesn't really bother with world-building with The Dog Stars. The story starts pretty abruptly, ends pretty abruptly, and in between, we get a bunch of disconnected situations, moments, and little stories that never really involve you in the process. We are not told much about what happened, why the characters behave the way they do, or who they actually are.
Each of them is basically just a piece of a character you're supposed to care about, or at least feel something for, but that never happens. But that never happens because we know almost nothing about them apart from the most basic backstory delivered in a few sentences, usually when they suddenly start telling their entire life story to complete strangers for no particular reason.
I understand that the movie is based on a book, but honestly, I still don't understand why the name of the story and its driving force are centered around the poor dog. And, more importantly, this is probably the first time in my life when I didn't feel any chemistry on screen between an actor and a dog.
The cast is also very much a hit or miss. Jacob Elordi looks absolutely bored on screen and isn't particularly charismatic. His character doesn't really make you care about him and isn't memorable at all, and the same goes for Margaret Qualley. In the end, the two most interesting characters in the movie are Josh Brolin and Guy Pearce. But they aren't the main characters and aren't on screen nearly long enough to carry the movie.
Strange motivations, unexplained emotional struggles, illogical decisions, a complete lack of proper backstories or even a decent explanation of what is happening in the present, antagonists who appear out of nowhere, and then a drug-fueled trip to an airport where the main character goes looking for his own paradise on Earth and instead finds some kind of acid cult.
The Dog Stars is essentially supposed to be a post-apocalyptic blockbuster. But it is so apathetic, insufficiently diverse, and simply not interesting enough that I honestly have no idea where the $70 million budget went.
In the end, this is a pretty scarce and very short story that starts being forgotten while you're still watching it. This is just not how you build a post-apocalyptic epic.
4/10
