This is my first blog in a while again.. as I said last time, work kind of killed some of my motivation to sit down and write. However, a shift in my daily routine means I’m going to try my best to get a blog out once a week.
Anyway, preamble aside, I have seen many films this year since my last review of ‘The Drama’. Some I will do a post on as I feel they remain relevant, others I may mention as part of other articles where I see fit. I wanted to write about The Dog Stars, a film that I found to be utterly mediocre, but have quite a lot to say about why I feel that way.
Ridley Scott, director of The Dog Stars, has not exactly been on a good run in recent years. Outside of The Martian and The Last Duel, nothing has really hit. Even then, The Last Duel flopped and isn’t really discussed much. Scott’s sensibilities seem to no longer align with audiences or critics. Of course, not everyone feels this way and you are entitled to love his recent work. However, when you compare it to his classics: Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise.. recently it’s mostly misses and the rare hit.
Unfortunately, The Dog Stars is not a hit. Lead by Jacob Elordi as Hig, a mechanic that is surviving in a post-apocalyptic Canada that took the majority of its population including his wife and unborn child, he has ambitions to visit the Grand Junction as he thinks it may be where he can find true human connection and not have to fight to survive every second of every day. Josh Brolin’s Bangley is Hig’s stand-in father figure, but his interests are purely survival instincts, leaving a lot of his emotions and desire for connection under a tough exterior.
I don’t think this premise is necessarily a bad one. I mean, it was a book beforehand, and I’m unsure of the reception to the source material, but Scott’s adaptation of it comes off as extremely bland. There are a lot of concepts in this post-apocalypse that I was waiting to find out about or see more of that amount to nothing, but nothing is put in their place, and it just ends up being aimless and boring.
Found Family at the End of the World
The core theme of The Dog Stars is very clearly stated as a longing for connection in a time that has destroyed all connection. Hig, having to deal with his immense grief, is struggling to cope. That lack of connection and communication is only made worse by the constant gatekeeping and violent nature humanity has been left in. Anyone who enters their camp, Bangley instantly kills regardless of their age or gender before they can humanise themselves.
Hig’s journey to Grand Canary is to rectify this. Maybe there is a part of this bleak world with people that won’t shoot point blank on sight alone. On his way though, he has issues with his plane and it has to emergency land in the mountains. It happens that he has found himself at a ranch guarded by Guy Pearce’s “Pops” and his daughter Cima, played by Margaret Qualley. Pops is not exactly welcoming in the same way that Bangley would be; Cima, however, seems to be less on-guard about Hig. Hig and Cima are similarly nostalgic for the old world and both grieving their spouses, both powerless to the apocalypse.
This was my favourite part of the movie, I quite enjoyed the dynamic between Hig, Pops and Cima, and how Pops eventually warms to Hig. The script doesn’t really do much with it though, we have a couple of vague conversations discussing the old times, discussing their depression and longing for connection but the surface level is the ceiling in this script, and it’s moved on from. Elordi is a great actor but because he’s given nothing, he comes off as incredibly bland here you find it hard to get a read on him, he feels like a generic lover-not-a-fighter widower. Pearce gets to be pretty funny, which is to his benefit, as with Bangley with Brolin, his character is quite funny. However, it leaves me wondering what the purpose of Bangley is in this narrative. He is the antithesis of Hig but he is like a father figure to him, yet Hig leaves him and finds Pops, another father figure to him. Bangley is relegated to an odd subplot I will get back to.
As much as I love Margaret Qualley, Cima is given even less in this screenplay than the other characters. She represents Hig moving on with his life and finding something or someone to live for. I just wish I understood her motivations and her backstory more. I wonder if this story would benefit from being about Pops and Cima instead of Hig as those two have far more intruiging characters but I was left wanting more from them.
Overall, though, I found the found family element of the film to be the one part I could cling to and it certainly helps this film a lot. I just feel as though it’s too shallow to make the film work and especially when the post-apocalypse the entire narrative is built around is a complete mess.
A Hot Pot of Post-Apocalyptic Concepts
Again, I haven’t read the book this is based on, and I’m sure most of these concepts the film takes are in it, but to what extent I don’t know. The Dog Stars‘ apocalypse was a virus taking away a bit over half the population as far as I understood. It’s set in 2035 so it’s near-future. However, there were several other moments in this film that suggested other issues in the world. For example, these primal marauders that were referenced a few times to be killing those who survived, and attack Bangley’s base, and are nowhere to be seen after that.
When I heard about these marauders, I assumed they’d be pivotal. This concept that there is a group of extremists that are killing survivors of this devastating global pandemic, why are they killing them? What are their beliefs? I understand that not everything needs to be explained or show up in a world you’re building up, but in a story of connection and grief, a group of people who have dedicated their life to killing survivors of this virus could fit in this narrative quite well. The extent of their narrative function is some cryptic wall painting seen by Hig in the start, mention of them coming for them, and then that Bangley scene where he singlehandedly fends them off and kills them. If one character can fend them all off, I don’t see what the point in hyping them up is? Was their role in the story to give Josh Brolin a scene? Admittedly, it’s a fun scene and it doesn’t fit the rest of the film at all — that’s not really the tone of the film that is aggressively somber and personal.
In addition, when we do eventually make it to Grand Junction, we find a millitary guarded vault with Allison Janney dressed in a flight attendant suit, a remnant of her previous life. Assumedly, this would be a vault for the survivors to hide from these marauders but it doesn’t really seem like that’s the angle here, the people in this building are all old, it comes off more as a retirement home, and a fake recreation of old commercial America. I found that fascinating, she also states she wants to rebuild the world. This part of the film contrasts drastically from the empty mountains and abandonded cities, but it’s a natural contrast. Maybe it’s just the stories I watch, but finding people desperately clinging onto the past, using old technology post-apocalypse makes sense. I was excited to see how this was going to be explored.
Ultimately, all it amounts to is what felt like a 10 minute sequence where they are put in danger by Janney’s character ordering Cima get married away, and Hig and Pops killing everyone and blowing up Grand Junction as a whole. I’m unsure if I was just seeing things but it even seemed like the people in Grand Junction were robots… like, if I’m not being stupid and that was actually true I would’ve loved to see more of Janney and her motivations… but she’s killed as quickly as she enters the narrative and it makes the entire section seem pointless and just added to have more explosions.
On paper, having all these concepts in one world could be interesting. Scott didn’t convey it very well and the film’s world feels generic with random concepts just thrown in for exciting setpieces. I’m certain these parts of the world are most likely explored in the book. On the big screen, it is just a preview of ideas, overwhelmed by a generic and bland world with the skeleton of a story about human connection.
It’s hard to really connect to characters when you have no grasp of their world or their histories — and no, dead wife flashbacks aren’t a Get Out of Jail Free Card..
5/10
Mediocre
Newton's Law 