Peter Heller’s “The Dog Stars” arrived in 2012 and quickly became a national and New York Times bestseller, eventually landing on several year-end lists and earning a spot on the shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The novel has since been published in 26 languages, the kind of reach that made a Hollywood adaptation feel inevitable. What is more intriguing is that, more than a decade later, the material landed in the hands of Ridley Scott.
Having directed almost four dozen films across nearly five decades, every new project from Scott now carries a little more weight. He has never been defined primarily by literary adaptations, but some of his strongest films started on the page. “Black Hawk Down” transformed Mark Bowden’s nonfiction account into a visceral war film, while “The Martian” turned Andy Weir’s publishing phenomenon into one of Scott’s most satisfying movies. “The Dog Stars” gives him another survival story on a large scale, only without the narrative clarity that helped make “The Martian” work so well.
That comparison becomes useful almost immediately. In “The Martian,” Mark Watney is separated from his crew by millions of miles, yet there is never much confusion about how he became stranded or what he needs to do to survive. We watch Watney grow food, create water and reuse the limited resources around him, with each problem revealing something about both his ingenuity and the world of the film. Disaster creates the circumstances, but survival becomes the story.
“The Dog Stars” begins from almost the opposite position. We are dropped into a situation Hig (Jacob Elordi) and Bangley (Josh Brolin) have already spent years learning to manage. A pandemic has killed most of the population, Hig’s wife has been dead for some time, and the two men have established themselves at a Colorado airstrip with a routine already in place. Bangley makes his own ammunition and uses night vision to protect the treeline, while Hig flies a small Cessna and delivers food and medicine to nearby survivors.
There is plenty of material inside that setup, but surprisingly little explanation of how it came together. We never understand how Hig and Bangley met, why the airport became their home or what the remaining rules of the pandemic actually are. Hig keeps his distance from the people he helps, even as his dog can interact with them freely. The film establishes a functioning survival system while leaving much of the reality surrounding it undefined.
That lack of foundation becomes more damaging because Hig himself is built around contradictions the screenplay never fully connects. He continues helping people who depend on him and holds onto the belief that the end of the world does not mean people have to stop being human. At the same time, Hig admits to thoughts of simply flying his plane into a mountain. He believes there are people worth saving while remaining uncertain whether his own life is worth continuing.
There is a compelling character somewhere inside that conflict, but Hig often feels like several people sharing the same body. He is compassionate but emotionally distant, desperate to find something beyond his current existence but resistant when meaningful connection appears. Contradictory people can make fascinating characters. The problem is that the film gives us the contradictions without enough of the internal logic connecting them.
Elordi fits comfortably inside Scott’s ruined landscape. There is a weathered quality to Hig from the beginning, and some of the actor’s strongest moments are also the simplest. Watching Hig work on his plane tells us more about him than many of the flashbacks do.
The flights themselves provide some of the film’s strongest filmmaking. Scott and longtime cinematographer Dariusz Wolski contrast the small Cessna against enormous stretches of wilderness, while strings and Americana-inspired music give the sequences an unexpected peace. Abandoned cities and empty fields create a post-apocalyptic world that feels lived-in without constantly announcing the apocalypse.
Brolin is even better. Bangley is paranoid, practical, violent and often hilarious, bringing some of the hard-nosed tactical presence of “Sicario” into a world that occasionally feels pulled from a Coen brothers Western. He has accepted the world exactly as it is and sees little value in imagining something better. Because his actions so clearly reveal his worldview, Bangley feels more complete than Hig despite receiving significantly less backstory. Brolin’s ability to shift from dry humor to sudden brutality makes him the film’s most engaging presence.
A faint radio transmission eventually pushes Hig beyond the airstrip and toward Grand Junction. Trouble with the plane interrupts his journey, and a stray donkey leads him to Cima (Margaret Qualley) and her father, Jack (Guy Pearce). Pearce gives an engaging portrayal of the kind of wary, protective father you would expect to survive in this world, while Qualley brings warmth and personality at exactly the moment the movie needs both.
Cima also exposes one of the strangest failures in Hig’s story. Both characters have lost spouses, yet Cima simply talking about her husband carries more emotional weight than the flashbacks involving Hig’s wife, Melissa. In a rare instance where telling proves more effective than showing, Cima’s recollection gives us the feeling of a real relationship. Hig’s flashbacks offer fragments of his marriage, but never create the same emotional understanding.
That matters because Melissa’s memory is supposed to explain why Hig cannot move forward. When Cima presents him with the possibility of another life, his resistance should reveal something specific about him. Instead, we are left trying to understand why the man who leaves Bangley’s airstrip searching for something more is so reluctant to accept that possibility when it finally appears.
The Grand Junction sequence is where those narrative problems become especially difficult to overlook. Without getting into spoilers, what begins as a menacing and uncertain encounter changes tone so dramatically that it feels as though the film has wandered into another story. Decisions that appear designed to extend the set piece come at the expense of character motivation, while what should expand our understanding of the surviving world only makes that world harder to believe.
Grand Junction also exposes a larger problem with geography. Distance should matter enormously in a story about scattered fragments of civilization. Leaving home is dangerous, encountering another survivor should carry weight, and every new settlement should tell us something about how humanity reorganized after the collapse. Instead, places appear with little relationship to one another, hostile groups emerge with almost no context, and the movie rarely gives us a convincing sense of how these pieces fit together.
In a story where distance is crucial to defining isolation, distance itself becomes strangely irrelevant.
Scott is far more effective when he can work in the immediacy of a scene. A nighttime confrontation involving Bangley makes excellent use of darkness, gunfire and night vision, while later pursuits once again show how naturally Scott stages movement and violence. The sound design gives those sequences a physical presence, and there are enough striking images throughout “The Dog Stars” to keep the movie engaging even when the larger narrative struggles to hold together.
That is what makes the film so frustrating. “The Dog Stars” is far from bad. Brolin is terrific, Qualley brings genuine emotion, Elordi finds strong moments of quiet weariness, and Scott still knows how to create an image or stage action with a confidence few filmmakers can match. There are worthwhile ideas here about maintaining humanity after civilization disappears, grieving the life that existed before and deciding whether survival by itself is enough.
Yet those ideas never fully develop into a cohesive narrative. The film begins after many of the experiences that could have helped us understand Hig have already taken place, then keeps moving before the contradictions within him can take on real shape. By the time the story reaches Grand Junction, questions that initially feel like missing details have become problems with the structure itself.
At this point in Scott’s career, that makes “The Dog Stars” an especially curious choice. The landscapes, aircraft, violence and damaged characters give him plenty to work with visually, and the result remains engaging enough in the moment. What it never develops is the narrative foundation capable of turning those pieces into something singular. After a career that includes “Alien,” “Gladiator,” “Black Hawk Down” and “The Martian,” Scott has earned the freedom to make whatever interests him. “The Dog Stars” simply leaves you wondering what about this particular story made it worth occupying one of the remaining chapters of such an extraordinary career.
Letter Grade: C+