The Dog Stars review

The dog doesn't actually star here. The title is a lie. 😏🐕😆

But if you're going to see this movie anyway, see it in Dolby Cinema. It is beautifully shot. Whatever problems I have with the story, the movie itself looks gorgeous.

It's a post-apocalyptic world and you're following Jacob Elordi as Hig going about his post-apocalyptic business. He and Josh Brolin's character, Bangley, live on what's basically a ranch slash airfield and defend it from scavengers and anybody else who tries to encroach, usually pretty violently. The first stretch is mostly Hig and his dog doing Boy Scout activities, helping out a local Mennonite group, delivering resources, letting their kids play with the dog, generally trying to hang onto some connection to other people. He and Bangley are your two-man world at this point, with Brolin playing sort of a mentor.

I have to mention the Mennonites because this may be the most diverse Mennonite community I've ever seen in my life. Benedict Wong is apparently their leader, and this group looks like they stepped directly out of a Benetton ad after the apocalypse. I thought that was hilarious. They're also about the least overtly religious Mennonites I've ever seen, and I don't know what they were going for. Maybe somebody wrote "Mennonite community" into the script and casting decided to go sideways with it. Wong is a great actor and he has almost nothing to do here, so I don't really know why they needed him.

Eventually something traumatic happens and Hig decides to leave the little world he's built with Bangley and find out whether civilization still exists somewhere. He thinks there may be something around Grand Junction, so he gets in his plane and goes looking. He crash-lands on the way and runs into Margaret Qualley and her father, played by Guy Pearce, who are doing basically the same thing Hig and Bangley are doing, closed life on the farm, defending themselves from scavengers. Then you have Elordi and Qualley standing next to each other in a world where there apparently aren't many young adults left, so you know where that's going.

There's nothing wrong with the acting. Elordi is good, Qualley is good, Brolin is good, Pearce is good. Everybody is doing their damnedest and Ridley Scott is doing his damnedest. The script is the problem. There's just not much here I found compelling. I understand the story and I understand it's based on a book, but it's mostly hitting the basic post-apocalyptic beats we've seen a lot of times. Scavengers, isolated survivors, people wondering whether civilization still exists, people protecting their little piece of land, and eventually the two attractive young survivors finding one another.

The most interesting action is probably Brolin dealing with these roving bands of meth-addled tattooed white people who behave almost like zombies. They're not zombies. They're apparently just people. But they behave enough like animals that we're all supposed to be perfectly comfortable with Brolin killing tons of them. The body count is very high. At times it's almost like somebody wanted a little John Wick in their post-apocalyptic drama, except the movie doesn't live in the violence or have as much fun with it as the Wick movies do. Some of it is fun. That's just not what this is.

Toward the end, when Hig reaches the place he's been trying to get to, the movie takes a pretty wild left turn involving Allison Janney. I won't get into it because it would spoil things, but that stretch is the strangest and most entertaining part of the movie, and also fairly predictable once you understand what's happening.

I know this has gotten pretty poor reviews. I'm not giving it one. This is a competently made movie, beautifully shot, built around a weak story, and that's different. It's been an issue with some Ridley Scott movies recently. Give the man a good script and he'll give you a good product, but he's not improving a weak one for you. He can make an incredibly beautiful version of that weak script and it still goes out weak.

I liked The Dog Stars enough to watch it. I'm not going to tell you to rush out and see it. But if you get a chance to see it in Dolby Cinema, that's worth doing, because this thing is gorgeous there.