Jacob Elordi’s post-apocalyptic drama The Dog Stars is all too familiar

‘You’ve got to have something to haunt you, right? Otherwise, you might get lonely.’

Long before sensitive-but-practical widow Cima (Margaret Qualley, How to Make a Killing) shares this we-all-have-baggage sentiment with Hig (Jacob Elordi, Euphoria), an introspective mechanic and pilot mourning his own spouse in a decimated future, The Dog Stars is indeed a film haunted.

Helming his 30th feature and marking a mere year off half a century behind the camera, Ridley Scott brings Peter Heller’s 2012 novel to cinemas with an inescapable sense that the past can rarely be shaken – in the movie’s on-screen reality, set nine years after a devastating flu pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, and also for a survivalist drama-meets-dystopian western treading well-worn terrain.

How do you carve out a fresh path forward when history weighs down your every move? Should you even try? Grappling with these questions fares better for The Dog Stars’ characters, including the grizzled paranoiacs played by Josh Brolin (The Running Man) and Guy Pearce (The Woman in Cabin 10), than for the film itself.

Still, it’s a more interesting feature for having that conversation, even while veering widely between oh-so-generic and warmly thoughtful.

It’s the end of the world and they know it

Courtesy of recent real-life events and the hordes of post-apocalyptic tales that’ve filled screens big and small, it takes little imagining to feel the sorrow and uncertainty that infects Hig’s daily existence. The year is 2035, his dutiful dog Jasper is his steadfast companion, and he’s eked out a life residing with Brolin’s ex-Marine Bangley – one that’s barely even modest by his standards, but the equivalent of the American dream, his friend contends, in such desolate times.

From the remnants of an old airstrip in Eerie, Colorado, Hig flies in and out of Denver on supply runs, and to linger in memories of what he’s lost. En route home, he delivers essentials to a secluded Mennonite community (led by Brolin’s Weapons co-star Benedict Wong). Bangley stays behind, surveying the perimeter for interlopers he dubs ‘roaches’ and always shooting on first sight.

Open hearts versus closed minds, plus kindness clashing with caution, prove prominent themes in the screenplay by The Revenant and The Midnight Sky’s Mark L Smith, who again ruminates on what it takes to endure.

That Hig will follow his niggling belief that there’s a better way, trying to track down the origins of a faint radio signal out of Grand Junction, is a matter of if, not when. So too is forging new connections, in this case Cima and her protective father Pops (Pearce).

Aside from the lurchingly over-the-top tone of a third-act encounter in an old regional airport, which wouldn’t feel out of place in the video game adaptation Fallout, Scott and Smith show little concern for surprising viewers.

Watch the trailer

Blazing trails and following in footsteps

Audiences have already seen the one about a virus-ravaged society, a grieving man roaming across cityscapes and countryside alike, the bonds made along the way, the empty promises exposed, the violent dangers faced and the tough ordeal, both physically and emotionally, to even dream of beginning anew.

We’ve seen more than one, in fact. If you’ve watched Danny Boyle’s original 28 Days Later or game-to-TV hit The Last of Us as well, be it recently or ever, the narrative similarities are glaring.

The bulk of The Dog Stars’ beats spring from Heller’s pages, of course, but giving them such a dispiritingly familiar air is a choice.

That’s especially true given the movie isn’t afraid to colour outside the lines elsewhere, as seen in the care it has for its characters, the refusal to offer up straightforward answers, the space it gives to contemplation, and the visual splendour (via Oscar-winning Mank cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt’s lensing of the Italy-standing-in-for-America scenery).

As the director of Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and The Martian, Scott has stood on the other side of this exact situation for almost his entire career. Few movies don’t owe his seminal films a debt, particularly dark sci-fi visions, on-the-run chases, historical epics, war thrillers and survival stories.

It isn’t by accident, then, that as a picture where a repeated broadcast is pivotal to the plot, The Dog Stars interrogates the past’s echoes and what we make of them, right down to its very fabric.

Leaning into being haunted is both Cimi’s advice to Hig and the film’s whole approach.

Engaging but uneven

As Hig experiences in his weathered Cessna, however, there’s a difference between gliding and simply staying airborne. The Dog Stars might have big-thinking intentions, but it fails to give every detail within its frames the requisite consideration – blatantly musing on xenophobia’s follies, for instance, but also styling the roving threats to Hig, Bangley, Cima and Pops as tattooed gangs and axe-flinging, mohawked-adorned, horseback-riding tribes.

For a filmmaker with such an impressive record with action set pieces, there’s a flatness to Scott’s latest frays and stampedes as well, excepting a night-vision-lensed onslaught painted with popping splashes of green in the inky darkness.

Thankfully, an ensemble featuring two Oscar nominees from the past two years (two Australians at that) is difficult to squander. Elordi, who played haunted so heartbreakingly in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, handles leading-man duties with quiet poise. Pearce takes a couple of scenes to settle into his gruff accent, but finds nuances within what could’ve been a one-note character.

Brolin and Qualley also range beyond Bangley’s surly pseudo-mentor and Cima’s empathetic love-interest archetypes. We’ve seen their ilk before, yes, but there’s such a spark to Brolin’s tetchiness and an earthy radiance to Qualley at her most genuine.

If you can’t completely evade the past, then make the most of everything you can? The Dog Stars’ cast wholeheartedly embrace that brief – more so than the engaging but uneven film around them.

The Dog Stars premieres in Australian cinemas 27 August.

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