Ridley Scott has been making surprisingly and consistently bad films in recent years. He actually did a very good job with The Last Duel. And contrary to the general consensus, House of Gucci was a film I quite enjoyed. Perhaps the fact that it had some very good performances had something to do with it. Yes, I liked Jared Leto and Lady Gaga’s performances. But with Napoleon and the most unnecessary sequel in the world, Gladiator II, Ridley Scott has done quite a lot of damage to his brand.
Actually, although I hadn’t liked this film much from the moment it was announced, I had a feeling that this time Ridley Scott would remember who he was and come up with something good. But it turns out what I was watching was yet another Ridley Scott film seemingly determined to move radically away from everything we love about his filmmaking.
Adapted from Peter Heller’s novel of the same name, the film is set in 2035, in the deserted countryside of Colorado, years after a pandemic wiped out much of the world. Hig struggles to survive at an abandoned airfield. He is accompanied by his loyal dog Jasper and Bangley, a former soldier who sees anyone approaching as a threat. Hig flies an old Cessna to deserted towns in search of fuel and supplies, while Bangley protects the area with a gun. Their partnership works, but it is a cold one: one still searches for some trace of humanity, while the other knows only how to survive.
Although the film has some beautiful images, particularly in its enormous post-apocalyptic world and its landscapes of abandoned country houses, it fails to tell a story with enough substance to make you completely lose yourself in this world. It is unbearably boring, and throughout the film you feel as though you are aimlessly drifting from one place to another. The film’s slowness doesn’t even create much of an atmosphere; it only makes the film feel longer than it actually is.
The world has ended, almost everyone is dead, the characters have lost the people they love, and the few survivors are trying to build a new life. There is more than enough material here to construct a compelling story. But The Dog Stars turns all of this material into an extremely ordinary and soulless film.
One of the things I have always particularly loved about Ridley Scott is that the worlds he created were always as important as the stories themselves. The spaceship in Alien, Los Angeles in Blade Runner, or the battlefield in Black Hawk Down were not simply places where the films happened to take place; they were part of the films themselves. The Dog Stars, despite being about the end of the world, never manages to make us feel that this world has actually ended.
