The Dog Stars: Film Review

"The Dog Stars"Directed by Ridley ScottWritten by Mark L. SmithStarring Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, Benedict Wong, Allison JanneyRated R for strong violence, and languageRuntime: 118 minutesRelease Date: August 28, 2026

Final Thought

The Dog Stars boasts a potent setup and an interesting lead character but unfortunately gives in to its lazy direction and confused tone.

Rating

★★★ / 5

Logline

From 20th Century Studios:

The film tells the story of Hig, a young pilot who, together with a military survivalist, Bangley, has carved out an efficient but isolated homestead in a brutal postapocalyptic world. But when Hig receives a mysterious radio transmission, he ventures into the unknown in search of the hope and humanity he still believes exist.

Review: A Worst-Case Scenario

*Note: The underlined portions are hyperlinks.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there was a surge in interest around films that discussed major disease outbreaks and epidemics. Everybody and their mama watched either Contagion (2011) or Outbreak (1995) in an attempt to realize the extremes of what was about to happen to society.

In the years since, filmmakers have explored the pandemic and its impact to varying degrees of success, but none of them have gotten it quite right. The Dog Stars, Ridley Scott’s new feature and follow up to 2024’s Gladiator II (podcast here), starts an interesting exploration of post-COVID survivor’s remorse but loses itself early on… and never quite recovers.

Adapted from Peter Heller’s 2012 novel of the same name, The Dog Stars follows tormented pilot and mechanic Hig (Jacob Elordi), his dog Jasper, and their sharpshooting survival partner Bangley (Josh Brolin) in a dystopian future ten years from our current world where a mysterious influenza outbreak took most of the world’s population. As they protect their land in Colorado from ravagers and other potentially diseased threats, Hig, still mourning his pregnant wife, hears a voice on his air traffic radio. After a violent attack on their base, he decides to track it down in an attempt to find salvation and escape his life, meeting Cima (Margaret Qualley) and her father (Guy Pearce) along the way.

Most films that have been directly about COVID have proven themselves hollow as the lack of a true social reckoning with the pandemic both limits and puts immense stress on artists to provide solutions not found in real life. The worst offenders were those made in the years 2020 or 2021 which felt annoyingly reactive and admittedly cringe, like Doug Liman’s Locked Down or Jason Woliner’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Over the next two or three years, films like Ari Aster’s Eddington and Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi had a more developed sense of at least the “in-covid” mindset but still left me unsure of their grasp on the pandemic’s lasting implications - Aster’s film makes more of a statement but it seems more concerned with the effect of the politics of the time rather than the outbreak itself.

The Dog Stars, in dissecting its lead character, represents one of the first successful attempts at grappling with the long-term effects of COVID-19’s proverbial rampage… if only the film spent more than twenty combined minutes on it.

The moments focused on the lasting, dystopic effect of the pandemic surprised me the most and worked the best. It is specifically not COVID, but lines of dialogue referencing “the mask of civilization” and vaccines and depictions of ventilators and no-contact thermometers clearly code the film’s unnaturally lethal strain of the flu as such. I much prefer this film’s use of dystopian allegory to the other films’ direct setting in the years 2020 or 2021 as it allows the story to be about more than just COVID itself, but I oddly think this film is about too much other than COVID even though it never feels like much is going on. The film cares more about its extended plane scenes, limited explosions, and the forcedly proximate relationship between Elordi’s and Qualley’s characters than anything more societally interesting, which is even more unfortunate because it makes the film tonally confused.

Two violent sequences come to mind: an odd sequence featuring Allison Janney and a more fitting but still unusual scene that directly invokes American Western imagery.

Josh Brolin in "The Dog Stars"

The former sequence is incredibly reminiscent of the third act of the classic 2002 infection film 28 Days Later. Notably, the third act is my least favorite part of that film as it boasts a surprising and ill-fitting exploitation of the film’s female characters. The Dog Stars doesn’t go that far so much as it threatens to, but it’s a jarring shift nonetheless and one resolved so quickly that it made me wonder why include it in the first place. That sequence would likely be better in a different film, not this meditation on post-COVID grief. The latter, featuring a group of scavengers descending onto Brolin and Elordi’s camp, works better with the initial tone of the story, but the inexplicable coding of the group as Native and tribal - eschewing classically racist depictions of Native groups in classic American western cinema - sat weirdly with me, especially as the situation was violently handled.

The confused script by Mark L. Smith bears some of the blame, but as this film is directed by the legendary Ridley Scott, I must say I expected a more exciting and unique experience. His updated, speedy filmmaking process, involving upwards of 10 cameras for scene coverage when filming, makes his direction feel lazy. The monstrous number of cameras is felt less than in Gladiator II, where every arena fight and crowd scene clumsily showcases all twelve angles of coverage, but with the exception of that film, Scott’s directorial ventures have been increasingly lackluster since 2015’s The Martian. He’s the director of so many classics (1979’s Alien, 1982’s Blade Runner, 1991’s Thelma and Louise, 2000’s Gladiator, etc.), but unlike his peers Scorsese and Spielberg whose work is almost getting better with their age in some ways, Scott has gone the Eastwood route - where each film feels thrown together in his own race against THE clock.

There’s nothing wrong with making a film fast. It’s when the product feels hurriedly assembled that there’s a major problem.

As far as the cast, I liked Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin in their roles as survival partners. They play off of each other well with Brolin’s Bangley being a surprising comedic presence in the film. Elordi’s character interested me more than his performance, but the Oscar nominee has definitely left the angst of Euphoria behind. Margaret Qualley was, unfortunately, not of much note as her character - the only female character with backstory - is ultimately reduced to a sexual and romantic object for Elordi’s Hig. Her character becomes useful by the third act, but for most of the film, her protruding nipples are treated as her most important feature.

And then there’s the dog. Animal characters have long been effective for establishing pathos in films desperately in need of emotion and this film is no different.

L-R: Jacob Elordi and Margaret Qualley in "The Dog Stars"

Hig’s German Shepard named Jasper is THE star of the first act of The Dog Stars, and he damn near carries the film on his furry back - an early scene featuring Jasper and a near-sovereign group of Mennonites elicited more aww’s from my screening audience than I can remember. The dog (and what he represents to Hig) is a large crux of why I think later portions of the film work less than the first 20-30 minutes, but to go into more detail would spoil the film. All I’ll say is he’s cute as fuck and he’s the character you’ll care about the most.

This is COVID cinema. Unlike other films in the subgenre, The Dog Stars isn’t wholly concerned with societal agitations and fears during the pandemic but, by presenting a “worst-case scenario,” is instead one of the first of this subgenre to so directly confront the guilt felt by those whose families succumbed to the illness. When the film abandons this is when the film loses itself. The somber tone established in the opening act felt a bold creative choice, but the romance element mixed with the malapropos set pieces distract what could’ve been a harder-hitting summer adult drama - a kind of film that almost doesn’t exist anymore.

Viewed on 8/24/26 at press screening

Published on 8/25/26

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