The Dog Stars is about many things and most of them are not very fun to think about.
It is about failed ambition; that of an out-of-practice, middle-aged, unread poet forced into a career of manual labour he neither enjoys or appreciates. It is about the pointlessness of ambition; of that same man later eking out a life in the post-apocalypse — haunted more by his unkillable hope for something better than by the jerky made of human corpses he feeds his dog.
And it is about that survivor and his dog flying in their beat-up Cessna over the ruined remains of the world while vainly trying to find beauty in it. And being nearly broken when they fail. But then sometimes finding something beautiful after all — and that, somehow, hurting even more.
At least, that is what The Dog Stars by Peter Heller is about; a lyrically dour novel about a post-epidemic wasteland told through the eyes of our writer-turned-pilot, dog-loving hero, Hig.
But when it comes to the Ridley Scott-directed adaptation, it is more about a Jacob Elordi-shaped cardboard cutout version of Hig, stoically bearing the world on his shoulders with a sideways smile. Carrying the flame of humanity all on his own, in whichever hand isn’t already tightened around a hammer, wrench or plane yoke to yet again save someone else’s day.
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It’s about a 20-something-year-old, virile Everyman upon whose shoulder we sit, to be ferried from gun battle to maudlin monologue and back again. About the after-school-special style of hope in the face of horror. About distracting, inappropriate to the plot (but necessary to studio heads) action in place of drama.
It’s about laughably contrived scavengers mowed down by our protagonists like target practice — genre-appropriate targets made up to look either like the Lost Boys from Hook, or whatever banged-up “War Boys” they could still find kicking around the set of Mad Max: Fury Road.
In essence, it’s about the same thing as every other, more successful post-apocalypse films you’ve seen, but this time without the guts or energy to make it believably harrowing.
Which is all somewhat funny. Because when not comparing it against the critically acclaimed, imposingly successful novel, The Dog Stars is… still a disappointment.
Starting out following Elordi’s Hig as an I Am Legend-type city-scavenger, it at least has the aesthetics of a survival drama. And as we meet mule-stubborn Bangley (Josh Brolin), Hig’s irascible soldier-of-fortune compound companion, we get the beginnings of a fairly competent buddy film. One rooted in the chemistry between bristled, but (obviously) secretly vulnerable Bangley — a balance capably pulled off by an actor that, from Deadpool to No Country For Old Men, long-ago cornered the market on this archetype.
But it’s one impressive performance undercut by Elordi: an actor who, like Sydney Sweeney in The Housemaid, feels so self-consciously resistant to the idea of interiority that every performance could be described with either the adjectives “smouldering” or “brooding.” Like they are so concerned with their brand of bankable cool, they become incapable of vulnerability or experimental or — more importantly — human approaches to their performance. In other words, the anti-Robert Pattinson.
It’s a hesitancy and complacency that constantly leaves this Hig humbly, cutely smile-shrugging off yet another child calling him her hero. Or impassively racking another round in another dogfight — against an enemy just mean, dirty and unattractive enough to allow the audience to keep affording Hig their sympathies as the unequivocal good guy in all this moral muck.
It’s also a framing that allows for a smooth and easy depiction of good and bad, that doesn’t challenge its audience to identify with anyone who has realistic, unmarketable depth. It’s an overall inoffensive, and oddly lighthearted remaking of a dystopian drama, that goes so far as to remove any troublesome reference to climate change, which was originally peppered through the novel. Its simplicity extends to the sound effects, calling on foley artists to work overtime to seed endearing and plaintive animal-whines throughout the audio track, just in case you forgot to be sympathetic to the cute dog for 30 seconds.
Of course, the movie’s issues can’t all be laid at Elordi’s feet. That would fall more toward writer Mark L. Smith (The Revenant, Twisters), and how-the-mighty-have-fallen director Scott; the creative team that take the film’s cliche, but functional, intro and pivot to something both uneven and uninteresting. A plot that increasingly deviates from the book, though in ways that do nothing to reinterpret or reinforce its theme.
A bifurcated storytelling that splits its time between two characters in order to beef up what is essentially an introspective philosophical rumination with Michael Bay-esque battles. A feat of worldbuilding that starts grounded in reality, only to skip to laughably unserious — and at times vaguely offensive — tribes of survivors riding horseback while screaming. All culminating in an equal-parts absurd and visually ugly finale that cements the fact that Smith and Scott lost the plot about an hour ago.
Comparing to the source material, things feel even worse. Despite the fact Heller reportedly cried after his first viewing of the film (granted, largely due to just seeing his first novel making it to the big screen), it’s impossible to think how poorly this movie understands what made The Dog Stars great.
Partly it is the form, adapting as it does a novel whose story is as much its writing style as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — a book The Dog Stars is infinitely, and understandably, compared to. The script clumsily transitions a narrative written by, and from the perspective of, a poet in a world he can’t remember as home, to one that is more concerned with mixing explosions with a truncated love story.
One that takes lines like, “I was a troll who lived at the base of a tree. Looked at the world through a scratchy scrim of needles and branches. Lived on rain, on bits of song and memory,” and crafts a movie with no monologue or attempts at insight into the character. In short, a movie that does not understand or respect the purpose or power of language.
But it is also one that, instead of reimagining its message for a new medium, somehow both oversimplifies and misses it. It’s a surface-level reading and retelling that had Scott interpret the story as being about self-sufficiency, instead of the opposite.
It’s an adaptation that took the story of a man altogether defined by his self-doubt and self-hatred and replaced it with a competency porn flick about a man who just happens to be really good at everything. One that cast straight-talking leading man Elordi as the ostensibly neurotic, fraying lead. All while borrowing the one obvious element of the novel — a general pondering slowness — and assuming that is what gave it a sensation of solemn weight.
The poor direction is not, alone, enough to sink it. But enough to make The Dog Stars one of the most poorly made post-apocalyptic adaptations since World War Z. And that’s saying something.
