‘The Dog Stars’ Review: A Post-Pandemic Fable That Forgets To Take Flight

Ridley Scott returns to familiar genre territory with ‘The Dog Stars,’ a bleak vision of a world hollowed out by an unstoppable flu pandemic. Adapted from Peter Heller’s novel by screenwriter Mark L. Smith, the film follows Hig, played by Jacob Elordi, a grieving pilot who ferries supplies to a distant commune while sharing a fortified airport hangar with the trigger happy survivalist Bangley, played by Josh Brolin.

The premise arrives at an interesting cultural moment, landing in theaters years removed from a real pandemic that reshaped how audiences might receive this kind of story. There is clearly an ambition here to say something about isolation, trust, and what people become when the structures of civilization disappear. Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, and Allison Janney round out a cast that suggests this was meant to be a prestige survival drama rather than a genre exercise.

What actually unfolds is a film pulled in two directions at once, and it never fully commits to either. For long stretches, ‘The Dog Stars’ wants to be a quiet character study about grief and companionship, letting Elordi’s wounded stillness and his bond with his dog Jasper carry entire scenes without dialogue. Those passages have a real hush to them, and Elordi plays Hig with an aching, brittle gentleness that gives the film its only consistent emotional pulse.

Then the movie remembers it needs to be a Ridley Scott picture with stakes, and it lurches into action beats that feel bolted on rather than earned. Brolin is genuinely formidable as Bangley, all coiled paranoia and grim competence, but the character exists mostly to deliver a worldview the film seems half convinced by and half embarrassed of. The screenplay keeps circling questions about who deserves protection and who counts as a threat without ever landing on an answer, and eventually it stops feeling like ambiguity and starts feeling like avoidance.

The bigger problem is how little curiosity the film has about its own apocalypse. We are told a flu wiped out most of the population years ago, and beyond a few visual shorthand touches like abandoned vehicles and empty hospitals, the movie never digs into how this world actually works or what was truly lost. A story built on the idea of piecing together scraps of a shattered civilization needs those scraps to feel specific, and here they mostly feel like set dressing borrowed from a dozen other end of the world stories.

Visually, there is no denying Scott’s command of atmosphere, and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt gives the Colorado landscapes a cold, wide open beauty that suits the story’s loneliness. Harry Gregson-Williams’ score does a lot of quiet heavy lifting too, underlining moments the script itself doesn’t fully earn. It is a handsome film even when it is a frustrating one, and that tension between craft and content runs through nearly every scene.

Where ‘The Dog Stars’ ultimately loses me is in its back half, when a mysterious radio transmission sends Hig into the wider world and the movie pivots hard into spectacle. A couple of these sequences are staged with real muscle, but they clash so sharply with the meditative tone established earlier that the whole film starts to feel like two different scripts stitched together. By the time it reaches for a hopeful, almost mythic ending, that hope feels unearned rather than cathartic, because the movie spent so little time making its world or its ideas feel fully thought through.

I walked away from ‘The Dog Stars’ appreciating Elordi’s performance and Scott’s eye far more than the story surrounding them, which is a frustrating place to land with a filmmaker this capable. It is a film with real atmosphere and a couple of genuinely moving quiet moments, undercut by a script that mistakes withholding information for depth and never resolves the tonal whiplash between intimate drama and action showcase. Weighing the ambition against the execution, I am landing on 6 out of 10, a film worth watching for its craftsmanship and lead performance but not one that lingers the way it clearly wants to.

Have you seen ‘The Dog Stars’ yet, and do you agree with where I landed on it? Let me know in the comments.