'The Dog Stars Review: Ridley Scott's New Sci-Fi Odyssey Is an Action Movie Like No Other

Hig pilots his small, vintage plane up into the Colorado mountains, cuts the engine, and glides. Surrounded by endless sky and soft green forest, there’s a look of uneasy peace on the young man’s face. Serenity, grief, and a glimmer of a death wish swirl together against the canvas of Jacob Elordi’s perpetual 5 o'clock shadow as he soars silently through the air, waiting until the last possible minute to restart the engine and fly back home.

Quiet, contemplative moments like these keep The Dog Stars grounded and accessible throughout its sprawling post-apocalyptic story — even as director Ridley Scott piles on epic action set pieces and surreal, surprising sequences that sometimes push the film from prestige drama into absurdist spectacle.

In The Dog Stars, based on the 2012 book of the same name by Peter Heller and adapted by screenwriter Mark L. Smith (The Revenant), Elordi’s Hig is one of the few remaining survivors on Earth, years after a deadly virus swept the planet. He lives on an old airfield with a former marine named Bangley (Josh Brolin). All things considered, they have a pretty good life — plenty of whiskey, cigarettes, bullets, and the safety of a secure perimeter — but Hig wants something more.

He's obsessed with a faint radio message seemingly broadcast from a town called Grand Junction that he can only hear while flying up in the mountains. But Grand Junction is too far away to fly there and back on a single tank of gas, so he never makes the trip. Then, because this is a movie and things have to happen, eventually he does, setting off on an odyssey across the Rocky Mountain West and encountering new friends and allies along the way.

The best thing The Dog Stars has going for it is that it looks absolutely incredible. Scott teams up with cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (best known for his David Fincher collaborations) to capture both the pristine beauty of the Rocky Mountains and the haunting beauty of the abandoned cities and towns that dot the landscape. A good chunk of the film involves watching Elordi pilot his tiny yellow plane through the skies, and it never gets old.

Meanwhile, on the ground, Scott and Messerschmidt stage a series of explosive confrontations between our heroes and a seemingly endless trickle of violent scavengers. These unnamed, almost silent antagonists never get much of a backstory or motivation. They're just "roaches," as Bangley frequently puts it, introduced to get shot, exploded, and otherwise murdered. In its most climactic moments, The Dog Stars resembles the explosive warfare of Black Hawk Down or some epic Western the director has yet to release. (If it's anything, The Dog Stars proves that Scott really needs to make an actual Western at some point.)

Image: 20th Century Studios

Like with those unexamined "roaches," Scott and Smith never feel compelled to reveal much of anything about this post-apocalyptic world. A few sparse details about the virus that wiped out most of humanity are revealed in passing, but there's no opening title card or narration to spell out what happened. There's no unsubtle exposition to suggest perhaps civilization has survived somewhere else on the planet.

From the beginning, Hig feels deep down that Grand Junction is a dead-end, but he can't resist the allure of false hope. It's a clever subversion of the genre, which often piles on lore and speculation to give audiences the sense of a fleshed-out world. By doing almost none of that, The Dog Stars manages to feel more real than most post-apocalyptic stories.

Without negating any of the above, it's also important to note that The Dog Stars goes completely and delightfully off the rails in a surprising third act. I won't spoil anything about that big twist here (Disney's marketing has done a commendable job hiding what could have been a splashy way to sell this movie), but I will note that it has almost nothing to do with the original book. The script's writers conjured an entire plotline out of thin air, though there are some very clean parallels to major franchises that Polygon readers will be familiar with.

• Image: 20th Century Studios
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• Image: 20th Century Studios

That third act elevates The Dog Stars from enjoyable drama to instant classic (cult status pending until we get the box-office receipts); the movie's final moments will stay with me. Rather than go out with a bang, Scott pads the runtime with a final few scenes that let the audience spend just a bit more time with his characters. It might be unnecessary, but by this point, he's earned it. And ultimately, it's just one more chance to watch Elordi take to the skies in his plane, cut the engine, and glide.

The Dog Stars releases in theaters on Aug. 28.