Posted in: 20th Century Studios, Kaitlyn Booth, Movies, Review | Tagged: guy pearce, Jacob Elordi, josh brolin, margaret qualley, ridley scott, the dog stars

The Dog Stars Review: Disjointed Pieces of the Post-Apocalypse

The Dog Stars doesn't have an original bone in its body, and its execution isn't good enough to make up for its tonal disjointedness.

The Dog Stars is about four different movies smashed together, so while some moments work, they absolutely do not come together to form a coherent whole.

Director: Ridley Scott
Summary: In a post-apocalyptic world, a virus wipes out humanity. Survivors face roaming scavengers called Reapers. Protagonist Hig, a pilot, survived the flu but lost his wife.

The Dog Stars is the worst kind of frustrating movie to watch because there really isn't anything technically wrong with it. All the actors are delivering pretty good performances and appear well cast for what the script asks of them. It is directed by a director who could turn on autopilot and make a film that would be shot better than 65% of the major releases in theaters this year. The concepts are all ones we've seen a million times, so there isn't an original bone in its body, but they aren't executed so badly that it dips into incompetence. In pieces, this film works, but there are too many things going on for it all to come together.

The film's overall theme is a meditation on grief after the end of the world and on how different people cope with it. The various versions of that meditation are the different pieces of this film. We see the prepper who was ready for this to happen long before it did (Josh Brolin). The father-daughter duo, who happened to have the right land at the right time, have been carrying on while dealing with the loss of their spouses (Guy Pearce and Margaret Qualley). Then there is our protagonist, Hig (Jacob Elordi), who was about as ordinary as you can get before the world ended, and is just trying to keep it pushing as things go on. The other extremes are out there, but one aspect of them has been completely withheld from the marketing, while the Reapers that are running around are one of the pieces that don't fit in The Dog Stars.

When you see these Reapers, and you see the way they are acting, it would be reasonable for someone to assume that these people are maybe survivors of the flu, and it turned their brains into the consistency of baby food. They are acting so feral and out of their minds that brain damage seems like the only logical explanation. However, this isn't 28 Days Later, and it hasn't been that long since the world ended [Hig got his puppy, Jasper, not long before everything went to hell, and Jasper seems healthy and fine in the film as a German Shepherd, so if he's 10, I'd be shocked].

This isn't decades of inbreeding or centuries of humans forgetting how to human. The idea of human beings going buckwild in a post-apocalyptic world isn't a stretch at all [ask any woman without children if she would want to survive the collapse of society], but the Reapers are doing it to a level that is goofy and does not fit with the movie that Hig is mostly existing in. One moment, you have Hig talking about what he plans to do if he doesn't find what he's looking for at the end of this mysterious radio transmission, and it isn't exactly heartwarming, to a bunch of feral tattooed people running around acting like actual wild animals, and getting blown up by Brolin's doomsday prepper weirdo like this is a bad action movie. These pieces don't fit, and that is ultimately what kneecaps The Dog Stars.

It doesn't matter how many times it attempts to tug on your heartstrings with unearned moments of emotion or how it is attempting to make a point about grieving when everything around you has gone to hell. When you have a scene that feels like a side quest from a Fallout game, things aren't working. Perhaps this tonal dissonance is much more balanced in the book, but in the movie, it comes across as three or four different movies smashed together into one. It messes with the pacing, the structure, and undercuts any emotional impact the film was attempting to do.

The lack of originality is something else The Dog Stars has to contend with. There is nothing wrong with returning to familiar material, but when you do, you have to execute it flawlessly and ask yourself whether there is something you can do to make your new layer of paint stand out from the rest. There are brief moments of this, such as the implication that the flu that killed most of the world is not the only thing children born into this world need to contend with. With modern medicine gone, vaccines for illnesses that were once rare due to herd immunity are back. Hello world-ending flu, and welcome back Polio, Measels, and god knows what else. However, this is a throwaway line at best, and a minor plot point that is barely mentioned at the end. Aside from that, we've seen these post-apocalyptic beats before, whether on the small or big screen.

The Dog Stars doesn't have an original bone in its body, and its execution isn't good enough to make up for its tonal disjointedness. It's a Ridley Scott movie, so it's technically fine, it's not even bad, but it is so utterly forgettable despite the impressive cast and director that most people will forget it exists before Labor Day. Last summer, Darren Aronofsky released Caught Stealing, another film based on a book with an impressive director and cast behind it that was technically fine, but unoriginal and completely forgettable. There is a decent chance most of you forgot that movie existed, and in a year, The Dog Stars will be in the same boat.

The Dog Stars

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Review by Kaitlyn Booth

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5.5/10

The Dog Stars is about four different movies smashed together, so while there are some moments that work, they absolutely do not come together to form a coherent whole. 

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