Not All She Wrote

It’s the end of the world as they know it, and they are not feeling so fine.

Our protagonists — Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, and Guy Pearce — are nestled/hunkered precariously in a Coloradan outpost after some unspecified disaster — ecological, biological, military? — has left things in a wasteland condition, and survivors are scrambling and xenophobic, for good reason. Unexpectedly, one heroic safe haven amid this earthly hellscape is a happily cloistered Mennonite community. Go figure.

The film, based on the novel by Peter Heller, qualifies as a reasonable and entertaining enough new contribution to the growing realm of cultural artifacts which some have dubbed “Apocalpytikitsch.”  

Director Ridley Scott is no stranger to the rough charms of future dread, having launched his sweeping career 40 years ago with Alien and Blade Runner. He returns to another dire corner of retro-future angst with The Dog Stars, a somewhat modest entry in the filmography of this Scott brother (sib of the late, slicker Tony), after the epic sweep of his previous films, Napoleon and Gladiator II. But the film holds its own as a late summer diversion. It’s by no means a blockbuster, but it’s not lackluster: It’s got some game, gumption, and spit going for it.

And, not unlike Blade Runner, the film freely meanders between extant movie genres as we know them. Sci-fi sidles up against melodrama, with spurts of mini–Mad Max–y violent action (via aggro-zombie-like “reaper” characters). And suddenly, we’re flown into an anomalous episode at Grand Junction airport that shifts into the stuff of surreal black comedy. (There, our tour guide to giddy madness and malice is Allison Janney, a wise casting choice.)

At the core of the story is one man’s odyssey, if you will, through the murky thicket of a grim time to find fellow pockets of humanity. We meet the civilian pilot Hig and his lovable German Shepherd, Jasper, in what appears like a slice of a good life in the Colorado wilderness, as they happily fly in a plane to get provisions in Denver. But this Denver is decimated and almost unpopulated, except for dubious figures with ill or absent intent. Clearly, the world has gone south. 

But alas, there is love among the ruins, in the form of Cima (Qualley), whose father, Jack (Pearce), is initially suspicious but increasingly in sync with the handsome pilot. He retains a hope for humanity, which he seeks to discover through his travels, in contrast to his cynical partner Bangley (Brolin)’s approach to strangers: “shoot first, inquire later.” Beyond the familiar and even comforting elements of character and narrative design, the general lay of the cinematic vocabulary landscape is fairly scattershot.

For whatever reason and degree of artistic intention, The Dog Stars falls into the category of recent films willfully freeing up snug genre affiliations; hyphenation is the rule of order for such hard-to-pigeonhole films as Sinners, Eddington, One Battle After Another. In this case, however, the all-important center doesn’t always seem to hold, and we’re left in a drifting state by the unevenness of the whole. 

After it all washes out, the film leaves us with disarming memory jolts, including Allison Janney’s deliciously evil mug, Josh Brolin’s Zen badass charisma, the pure essence of Jasper the dog, and a new appreciation of the simple values of Mennonite life.