Almost thirty years ago, a Ridley Scott-directed, Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring adaptation of Richard Matheson’s seminal, post-apocalyptic, science-fiction/horror novel, I Am Legend, came tantalizing close to being greenlit by Warner Bros.’ executives. Due to rising production costs, faltering box-office prospects for Schwarzenegger’s action-star status and Scott’s brand as a go-to, A-list director, and, among other factors, clashing creative visions, it didn’t. That version of I Am Legend, a decade later repurposed as a starring vehicle for Will Smith, became another story passed around the industry of another failed project.
While both Schwarzenegger and Scott moved on, Schwarzenegger to a short-lived political career as California governor and frequent returnee to the Terminator franchise, Scott to his usually varied, sometimes variable forays into distinctly different genres, Scott never fully left Matheson’s post-apocalyptic world — or a reasonable facsimile — behind. Scott found his post-apocalypse in Peter Heller’s well-regarded 2012 novel, The Dog Stars, and an adaptation penned by Mark L. Smith (Twisters, The Boys in the Boat, The Marsh King’s Daughter).
Far less than the action-oriented, Mad Max-coded entries typical of post-apocalyptic fiction in literature or on film, The Dog Stars takes a more ruminative, contemplative, ultimately meditative look at a no longer human-centered world. Of course, Scott perfectly understood that a studio budget demands an obligatory collection of set pieces, which Scott dutifully delivers. Through three, evenly spaced out set pieces, all three involving attacks on or escape from a compound, Scott reminds audiences of his finely honed, decades-in-the-making skills action-wise.
It’s in the first and second set pieces, however, that The Dog Stars stumbles, if not fatally, then as close to fatally without going over the knife’s edge into the questionable exploitation of urban and neo-Western motifs, tattooed gangs of likely Central American descent in one instance, horseback-riding Native Americans in the second. Both lean into the ferality and ferociousness of the barely glimpsed attackers. Those same attackers aren’t prone to dialogue or compromise, instead relying on one post-apocalyptic trope, destructive, wanton violence, to answer for them. As such, they don’t even function as caricatures, let alone characters, just (nearly) faceless hordes taking (stealing) what others own by right of possession.
Setting aside that issue for the moment, The Dog Stars focuses primarily on a handful of survivors: Hig (Jacob Elordi, Wuthering Heights), a former mechanic who spends his free time either repairing or maintaining his single-engine Cessna; and Bangley (Josh Brolin), an ex-Marine and survivalist with a well-stocked arsenal to back up his claims on the grassy hilltop he shares with Hig, and later, Cima (Margaret Qualley), a former medical student, and Pops (Guy Pearce), Cima’s father and like Bangley, pre-prepared for an apocalypse caused by a global pandemic, a newly mutated form of the flu, that killed billions and left the world in ruins.
Hig spends most of his time either working on his plane, flying his plane, or dropping into either Denver, where he and his late wife, Melissa (Sai Bennett), lived, or into a nearby Mennonite community led by Aaron (Benedict Wong), to obtain or deliver supplies. Bangley, however, has no interest in the outside world. For him, the world ends at the boundary marker of their hilltop compound. Interlopers are met not with Greek-style hospitality (Xenia or “Zeus’s Law”), but with extreme prejudice (i.e., head shots), their bodies burned and buried almost immediately.
Understandably, Hig aches for pre-apocalyptic normality, repeatedly testing his plane’s limits in search of another, perhaps larger community he can join. Occasional radio signals from “Grand Junction” test Hig’s resolve and raise his hopes. When he eventually arrives in Grand Junction, Cima, now a romantic interest (if they can both get past their individual and collective trauma), and Pops (just because), what they find there, specifically Darlene (Allison Janney), the de facto leader of an airport-centered community straight out of the abusrdist, satirical excesses of 1975’s A Boy and His Dog, tests Hig in ways he didn’t expect.
Filled with long, sometimes too long (at least for some), longueurs, a heavy-hearted, introspective lead in Hig, and a clash of personalities and philosophies (High and Bangley at opposite sides), and an underdeveloped, if still occasionally moving romance, The Dog Stars falls noticeably short of Scott’s best, even upper-tier films. That’s at least in part, however, to the high standards Scott has set for himself and audiences, following Scott’s lead, the expectations they have for Scott’s films.
As always, a Scott-directed film is all but guaranteed to double as visual showcases for his talents behind the camera, and The Dog Stars is no exception. Credibly trading the Italian Alps for the Colorado Rockies, Scott and his cinematographer, Erik Messerschmidt (Ferrari, The Killer, Mank), deliver imagery, whether of a long-deserted Denver and its surrounding environs, or Hig’s graceful sweeps in his plane through the mountains, second to none, filmmaker-wise.
It’s a pity, then, that The Dog Stars, for all its strengths (e.g., visuals, individual scenes, set pieces), consistently feels undernourished, as if Scott, increasingly aware of his mortality (he turns 89 in November), felt a crushingly overwhelming need to get The Dog Stars and its statement about community, altruism, and ultimately, empathy, made before the screenplay was fully ready for production.
The Dog Stars opens theatrically on Friday, August 28th, via 20th Century Studios. Check the official site for local showtimes.
