With The Dog Stars, 88-year-old director Ridley Scott warns us that no matter how dire the circumstances, the past is a dangerous and unhappy place to move to. In 2035 Colorado, Hig (Jacob Elordi), Bangley (Josh Brolin), Pops (Guy Pearce), and Cima (Margaret Qualley), the four main characters, are among the few survivors of a flu pandemic that wiped out most of the population.
Hig is struggling with private and larger griefs – his wife died of the flu a year after they lost a baby, and humanity and everything he’s known have all but disappeared. Mourning the life he thought he would have, he is stuck on a memory loop that brings him back to his married home during his wife’s pregnancy, magically preserved in a state that suggests he is either fantasising it or spends a lot of time dusting. Soon, Hig will also grieve his guard and support dog Jasper, the last tether to his “Before” life.
Living in the small, defensible Erie airport with ex-Marine Bangley, Hig hangs on to old normalcy by getting on with tasks the way he used to. He announces his small Cessna’s takeoff as if there was air traffic control. He cooks for himself and Bangley. He shaves his beard. And he tries to find community. To Bangley’s dismay, Hig is friendly with neighbouring Mennonite families, a group of mostly background actors led by Benedict Wong, who present the only racial diversity in the movie.
Bangley, on the other hand, is very much living in the present, something he regrets not doing in the Before, when he had a wife and two daughters but spent most of his time away at war. Realising the good things you have while they are there is a recurring theme in The Dog Stars, both on screen and in Peter Heller’s novel.
Bangley sees Hig’s constant search for an elusive better as “stupid” and risky. He considers their patch of the Erie airport as the American dream, because they have power, food, water, weapons and a perimeter they can defend – Bangley has no problem shooting people on sight, as Hig tells him he might even relish it. Scott doesn’t go deep in interrogating that version of the American dream and the borderline men’s influencer vibe of the movie, possibly because it would further muddle a script that doesn’t quite know what it is.
The philosophical difference between Hig and Bangley is one of the most interesting strands. Brolin and Elordi deserve most of the credit for this – their characters are underwritten, but the actors draw good performances from each other. The film asks us whether we’d be a Hig or a Bangley in an apocalypse and reaches the easy conclusion that both archetypes are best off when they complement each other.
Hig and Bangley’s relationship nearly ends when Hig decides to follow a voice he heard on comms and leaves for Grand Junction, leading to great aerial cinematography by Erik Messerschmidt that captures the contemplative nature of Heller’s novel. The flights have a dark side, though, as Hig stops his Cessna’s motor in the shadow of a looming mountain. Hig’s suicidal ideation is a latent arc in the story, but he wants to die on his own terms, not murdered by scavengers or a horde of bison in a scene somewhat reminiscent of Mufasa’s death.
Whereas Bangley’s embrace of the present is partly cynical – he thinks that the pandemic took off the masks and revealed true human nature -- Hig hangs on to the belief that there is humanity and good left, and Grand Junction is his last hope at finding it.
Instead, he finds Pops and Cima, a father-daughter duo whose ranch he crashes near. Pops is another version of Bangley: a crotchety, capable man unafraid of violence. Cima is the first to embrace the newcomer – he has real coffee and cigarettes, and he is the first person of her age she’s interacted with in nine years. Like him, she is grieving a partner and the life that wasn’t, although she is more ready to move on. There is a budding romance, partly of circumstance, that Scott never lets breathe – the most emotional moment between the two immediately cuts to three back-to-back action sequences.
Everything comes to a head at the promised Grand Junction, in a 10-minute stretch that is tonally so different from the rest of the film (and from the book), it’s easy to imagine Scott having one of his director’s cuts saved somewhere.
Darlene (Allison Janney) oversees an uncanny world in an old airport, wearing a vintage stewardess uniform – she has set up a 1950’s-style community, complete with oily paramilitary and creepy inhabitants. Darlene uses the hope of “people so desperate for something better they will follow a voice” to run a cannibal farm. On its own, it’s a strong, unsettling sequence which wakes Hig up from his nostalgia. The camera lingers on his shaky hand as he realises that his promised land is worse than what he’s known so far, and that he endangered two people he cares about in the process.
Hig, Cima and Pops shoot their way out. They then carpet-bomb the airport with grenades Bangley gifted Hig when he left, a not-so-subtle visual proof that he is ready to accept the world he lives in. To really tie up the theme with a bow, Hig assures Pops that he doesn’t want to crash into a mountain anymore, goes back to his home to say goodbye to his wife, grabs Bangley to move everyone with the Mennonites, and he and Cima finally kiss. The broader threats are still there, but at least Hig has made peace with his lot and built a community to face them.
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