The Dog Stars

Sometimes you have to try and separate a film from the time in which its released.

For whatever reason, we often see spurts of films within the same genre get released at the same time.

From A Bug’s Life and Antz to the smorgasbord of space movies we got a few years back (The Martian, Gravity, Interstellar, First Man, Ad Astra et al.) and, of course, the superhero deluge.

After some fallow time, it seems the post-apocalypse is in vogue again in recent times with TV hits The Last of Us and Fallout and the 28 Years Later duo amongst others.

Ridley Scott’s latest: The Dog Stars, follows these and seems to be taking a critical bashing for simply not being any of those others.

That seems a little unfair as what we have here is a very well-made, beautiful looking, slow and methodical film stuffed with acting talent.

Does it lag a little behind its current brethren?

Sure but, unlike a lot of its cinema forebears, this allows us to luxuriate in its setting for the first half of the film.

This slow and steady world building, largely just following Jacob Elordi’s Hig and dog Jasper (such a good boy) around is excellent and will appeal to anyone who likes seeing these post-apocalyptic environments.

At the halfway mark, some random things start happening.

A Mad Max-styled gang enters the plot to no real effect and then, arguably even weirder, we get a Fallout-styled ‘retro-futuristic’ society living in a disused airport who also enter the film to little-to-no effect and it’s this third quarter which does mark the film down significantly.

These factions could be better explained in the source novel for all I know but here the tones are too jarring and snap us out of the story we’d been enjoying up to that point.

Fortunately, it does wrap up well albeit this also features another odd shift. Genuinely, you could cut little segments of each quarter of this film to show to somebody and they’d swear they were from four entirely different movies.

So there are elements that let it down but, on the whole, this is a hugely enjoyable post-apocalyptic film for any fans of the genre.

⭐️⭐️⭐️