A Beautiful, Melancholic Flight That Never Quite Takes Off
The Dog Stars finally arrived in cinemas this week after that quiet five-month slide from its original March 27th date to August 28th, and it’s being billed as Ridley Scott’s return to science fiction, his first proper genre trip on the big screen since Alien: Covenant back in 2017.
Which is a big, shiny promise to hang on what turns out to be a very small, very sad little movie about a man, his dog, and a plane that probably shouldn’t still be flying.
The film is a 2026 post-apocalyptic science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Mark L. Smith, based on the 2012 novel of the same name by Peter Heller, and it stars Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley and Guy Pearce among others.
The premise is stripped right from the novel’s dust jacket, and Scott mostly leaves it alone.
Nine years after an influenza pandemic and a subsequent blood disease kill most of the human population, Hig lives at an abandoned airport in Erie, Colorado, sharing the settlement with his ageing dog Jasper and Bangley, an armed survivalist, still mourning his wife Melissa, who died from the flu while pregnant.
In the shorthand we tell each other at the airport bar, Hig’s wife is gone, his friends are dead, and he lives in the hangar of a small, abandoned airport with his dog Jasper and a mercurial, gun-toting misanthrope named Bangley, but when a random transmission beams through the radio of his 1956 Cessna, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life exists outside their tightly controlled perimeter.
Outside that perimeter are the Reapers, roaming scavengers who are talked about a lot more than they are seen.
I went in expecting scale, because it’s Ridley Scott, the man whose filmography gave us Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiatorand The Martian, working with Mark L. Smith, who wrote The Revenant, so you assume you will get mythic suffering in vast landscapes.
What you actually get for 100 minutes is a hangar drama that occasionally remembers it has a plane.
The story is simple to a fault: routine, transmission, decision, flight toward Grand Junction and whatever might be there.
The structure is where it starts to wobble. The first third is the best, all procedural loneliness, how you check oil on a 1956 Cessna when no one manufactures oil anymore, how you live next to a man like Brolin’s Bangley who treats the apocalypse like a home improvement project he has been prepping for since 1982, how you watch your dog get old when you have already watched everyone else die.
It’s quiet, it’s handsome, it’s exactly the kind of melancholy Scott can do when he isn’t blowing up Roman coliseums.
Then the radio crackles and the film gets an idea, and for about twenty minutes you think it might become an adventure, all yellow plane against big dead American sky, Hig fishing in some high mountain creek pretending for an hour that things are how they used to be.
Then it gets shy of that adventure. It seems to realise that to chase hope it has to risk being corny, and rather than risk corniness it would rather just land the plane early.
That’s the sensibility of the whole thing, and it’s both its charm and its problem.
This is not a film about Reapers. It is a film about whether you get to stay a soft person after the world has ended.
Hig is not a hero; he is a caretaker who knows how to fly.
Jasper is not a movie dog; he is an old dog with stiff hips who has to be lifted into the co-pilot seat.
Bangley is not a villain; he is the friend you need but would never choose.
Scott shoots all of this with that late-career reverence; every sunset looks like a painting that took too long to dry, every interior is dust motes and dog hair and well-worn flannel.
When it works, when Elordi just sits with Jasper and listens to static, it is genuinely moving in that small, embarrassed way men get when they love their dog more than people.
When it doesn’t work, it feels like a film that wants to end itself. It doesn’t build to a climax at Grand Junction; it sort-of taxis toward it and then cuts the engine.
You can feel the adaptation being too faithful to a novel’s ambiguous grace note, and too nervous to invent a cinematic reason for us to feel that grace note in our chest.
And that is why it lands as just okay, and why okay feels disappointing here.
Coming from Scott and Smith, you expect a last act that either breaks your heart or blows up the runway, and instead you get a polite, pretty, slightly under-fuelled drift toward credits.
The Dog Stars is not bad. It is watchable, it is sincere, it loves its dog properly, and it has two or three shots of Colorado that will live rent-free in my head.
But it is a post-apocalypse that is more interested in mourning than in living, and after two hours you start mourning the film it could have been if it had been just a little less afraid to hope out loud.
Showing in IMAX and cinemas from Friday, 28 August.
-Dirk Lombard Fourie