REVIEW: THE DOG STARS

THE GIST

Even a seasoned director and veteran actors giving solid performances couldn’t save The Dog Stars from mediocrity.

SPOILERS AHEAD

The Dog Stars is not as interesting as it tries so hard to be. Its post-apocalyptic world feels assembled from familiar pieces of countless films that have come before it: I Am Legend, Mad Max, 28 Years Later and, well, insert post-apocalyptic movie title here.

Going in, I had my reservations. Ridley Scott is a masterful director, but also one whose films can be very hit or miss. The trailer made The Dog Stars look like your run-of-the-mill post-apocalyptic movie. Surely there was going to be some big surprise that took it in a fresh new direction, right? Right?

Unfortunately, The Dog Stars plays almost entirely on familiar ground.

At so many points another tired genre trope appeared:

• Post-apocalyptic setting after a virus

• Survivors suffering from traumatic past losses

• Protagonist surviving alongside his German Shepherd

• Dog gets killed to push the story forward

• Other survivors devolving into Mad Max-style tribalism

• Protagonist encounters one group he can trust and another he can't

And those are just the obvious ones.

None of these things automatically make a movie bad. Familiar ideas can be used to make something great. The problem is that The Dog Stars rarely does anything interesting enough with them to justify seeing them all again.

There are also moments where conversations feel forced purely because the audience needs information. One that stood out involved Benedict Wong's character unnaturally explaining that they ran out of vaccines years ago, hence children were now dying from diseases like measles. Everyone within earshot should already know this. The conversation doesn't feel like something these characters need to have. It feels like something the screenplay needs them to have because we need to hear it.

Then there are conveniences that make an already familiar story feel even more constructed. Hig crash-lands in the wilderness and conveniently finds a mule. That mule then helps lead him towards another survivor, a single woman around his age who, conveniently, has experienced a similar kind of loss. Any one of these things could be shrugged off. Together they start feeling less like events naturally unfolding and more like the story moving pieces around because it needs them in particular places.

My biggest problem, though, was that I simply wasn't invested in these characters. Everything on screen was telling me that I should relate to them. I heard their stories of loss. I understood their loneliness. I felt very little. At one point Hig reveals that he killed his own wife while she was dying from the virus because she could no longer breathe. On paper, that's horrific. It should be devastating. But hearing something tragic and actually feeling the tragedy are two different things. The film hadn't built enough emotional connection between me and the character for that revelation to land the way it clearly wanted it to.

There are also stretches where The Dog Stars becomes strangely drawn out, almost as though it has the running time of a television series to play with. Normally I don't mind a film slowing down. Quiet scenes can reveal character, build atmosphere or give previous events time to breathe. But too often here, nothing was moving forward. The characters weren't being deepened. The story wasn't advancing. It just sat in places of emptiness that could have been used for development.

There are things I liked. Ridley Scott can still create a visually striking film, and some of the wide establishing shots are beautiful. Josh Brolin and Guy Pearce bring the experience you would expect from veteran actors, and there are moments where the music works particularly well with the imagery. There is also an interesting story buried underneath everything about grief, letting go of the past and deciding whether merely surviving is the same as actually living. I just wish the film had dug deeper into it. Because if there is a bigger point Scott is trying to make with The Dog Stars, it gets lost underneath the mediocrity of its biggest faults.

I love Ridley Scott films, which perhaps makes this more disappointing. At 88, his ability to continue making movies on this scale is remarkable, but The Dog Stars feels less like a movie he desperately needed to make and more like one he simply made.

I'm still rooting for one more epic Ridley Scott film before either his time is up...

...or we're living through our own post-apocalyptic world.

And if The Dog Stars had thrown zombies into the mix as well, that would have been the last straw.

I probably would have walked out.

Swing and a miss!