Looking towards the end of an August movie dumping ground littered with more unwanted trash than usual, there seemed to be a faint glimmer of hope, a shiny treasure poking out through the dusty mass of unnecessary sequels and sex purge romcoms. Somehow, there was a $110m-budget adaptation of an acclaimed novel directed by Ridley Scott, led by a recently Oscar-nominated rising star with support from two Oscar-nominated actors and an Oscar-winner. But why then would such a film be unveiled in between the summer blockbuster season and the upcoming deluge of prestige fall festival big hitters? A cursed weekend that’s recently been home to Jay Roach’s heinous War of the Roses remake, Dennis Quaid’s Ronald Reagan biopic and George Miller’s hard-to-define and even harder-to-love flop Three Thousand Years of Longing.
Ever since The Dog Stars, based on Peter Heller’s 2012 novel, had been yanked from its far more encouraging date at the end of March, there were multiple red flags flying and the rotten end of August has ultimately become an appropriate punishment for a limp and lethargic film that only briefly fascinates in pushing us to wonder what anyone was really hoping this would end up being. It’s yet another grubby postapocalyptic survival tale, an overcrowded subgenre that hasn’t just reached maximum capacity on the big screen but on the small one too. In a world of seven Walking Dead shows, the beats are now far too familiar – artfully dishevelled actors grieve for the past and fear for the future as they scramble to find and protect resources – and there’s nothing new or notable here to conjure anything but deja vu.
In The Dog Stars, a flu pandemic has wiped out most of humanity and turned those who remain against each other. Mechanic Hig (Jacob Elordi) lives a simple, if stressful, life with dog Jasper and grizzled former marine Bangley (Josh Brolin) as they protect their remote Colorado compound and scavenge for supplies. But the pair share differing views on how to survive and what might come next, Hig the optimist and Bangley the opposite. The script, from Twisters writer Mark L Smith, tends to detail these differences a little too loudly, as if these characters were having such conversations for the very first time just for our benefit. It’s the kind of writing that, for all the film’s attempts to whip up a folksy charm, never feels convincingly lived-in, our investment then at a minimum when chaos inevitably lands.
Hig’s belief that something more is out there causes him to leave for a nearby hub and, on the way, encounter a father-daughter pairing (Guy Pearce and Margaret Qualley) who end up joining him just as so-called “reapers” – essentially bloodthirsty goth invaders – come a’knocking.
It’s not that the action entering the fray so late into the movie is the problem here (I’m all for a more subdued character-based end-of-days drama a la Z for Zachariah) or that the set pieces are all a little too cut-and-paste to truly excite (where the $110m budget went is a mystery). It’s that the plot and its characters are too maddeningly insubstantial to justify such human-over-spectacle storytelling.
Elordi, who was easily the best part of Guillermo del Toro’s otherwise mostly wretched Frankenstein, is on less sure footing here, a vast acting challenge followed by something considerably less interesting, and he seems as fatigued by playing Hig as we are at watching him. It’s a boringly absent lead performance of empty, stoic stares, although with a puddle-deep script that asks very little and gives even less as reward, there’s not much more anyone could have done (young man is impulsive, older man is cynical and, at its most thankless, young woman is nurturing). Smith’s dialogue is initially clumsy in its attempts to fill in the gaps (if you’re choosing to avoid a more straightforward introduction to the world and its rules then your exposition should be less awkwardly crammed in) before it graduates to stiff and obvious instead. A third act sequence, involving Allison Janney doing the very most, might have seemed more sudden and shocking in Heller’s book but it’s too derivative and unscary to wake us up on screen.
It’s an oddly directed yet not odd enough section that questions Scott’s once unimpeachable ability to put us on edge arriving in a film that makes us broadly wonder what he’s doing here in the first place. The scenery – rural Italy doubling for rural America – is genuinely stunning (and surely afforded all those involved a lovely vacation) but, as in Gladiator II, there are some weirdly janky visual effects (one explosion looks laptop-made) and a general uninvolved shrug to the proceedings, as if he replaced a more impassioned director late in the day. Scott’s disinterest in retiring is admirable (he’s openly loathsome of the idea), I just wish he seemed more interested in the day job.