From expansive historical epics like “Gladiator” (2000) to science fiction thrillers like “Blade Runner” (1982), Ridley Scott is a worldbuilding maestro who conveys the brutality of survival in beautiful imagery. His most recent film, “The Dog Stars” (2026), adapted from Peter Heller’s novel of the same name, serves as another example of his aesthetic prowess, yet fails to adhere to a coherent plot.
The film follows Hig (Jacob Elordi), a young man existing in a post-apocalyptic world after a pandemic wipes out the majority of humanity. Living on an abandoned airfield in Erie, Colo., with a grumpy old survivalist called Bangley (Josh Brolin) and his beloved dog, Jasper, Hig uses a small propeller plane to make supply runs into abandoned Denver, occasionally picking up radio signals from Grand Junction. After Jasper is killed by marauders, Hig leaves Erie and Bangley behind to find Grand Junction, meeting his love interest, Cima (Margaret Qualley), and her father, Pops (Guy Pearce), along the way.
The film begins with Hig on a supply run in a sequence that reveals the world so slowly that it feels peaceful despite the burned bodies in the street. The first glimpses of Denver are from the safety of the cockpit, giving the viewers time to admire the beauty of green mountains and crumbling buildings.
Upon landing, Hig’s thorough routine answers any question one could have about post-apocalyptic life: How do they get medicine? Where do they get gasoline? Where did the dogs go? Do the TVs still work? Hig’s relatively uneventful supply run makes the apocalypse feel mundane while simultaneously establishing the world in 2035 without extensive voiceover or forced, expository dialogue.
Yet the commitments to striking imagery and time-intensive worldbuilding come at the expense of plot development. Hig and his friends are attacked by multiple groups of visually interesting marauders, including a horde of pale, bald, heavily tattooed scavengers. While the audience learns where Hig can find Coca-Cola, they never learn what these tattoos mean.
By establishing the mystery of these people, the film creates an unspoken and unfulfilled promise to resolve it. Despite being discussed multiple times, they only appear once more in the film to attack the protagonists before disappearing entirely. Disturbing night vision shots capitalize on their distinctive appearance and distorted movements. But any other tribe could have executed the attack, and there is no justification for their bizarre presence and behavior besides its aesthetic effect.
Hig’s journey to Grand Junction is similarly underdeveloped. After long, cinematic sequences, the film sacrifices even more time by pausing the quest storyline to create space for a love storyline rather than allowing the two to develop simultaneously.
Almost immediately after leaving for Grand Junction, Hig crash-lands his plane in the mountains, then repairs it while falling in love with Cima. Both Cima and Hig are widowed, both enjoy listening to music and drinking coffee and neither has exposure to other young people. As they fall in love, there are no trials to reveal deeper characteristics, values or fundamental compatibility. While many relationships begin with small talk over coffee, a film exploring how to find contentment in an unforgiving reality calls for more emotional depth.
Even after resuming, Hig’s quest falls short of a hero’s journey. Grand Junction is easy to find because Hig already knows where it is, and there are few obstacles to their arrival. Hig’s hopes for a better place are quickly dispelled, and the protagonists must flee and return to Erie. Their escape is dangerous, but once again improbably easy — they escape unharmed and unpursued. Furthermore, the journey does not cultivate their interpersonal relationships because Hig and Cima are already in love and Pops is already fine with it.
The climax at Grand Junction teaches Hig to appreciate what he has — a moral that Bangley tells him explicitly. Yet, Hig already knew how to be content — he spent every day of his pre-pandemic life with a job he enjoyed, a wife and dog he loved and a baby on the way, wondering how he got so lucky. Only after losing everything did he become discontent with his place.
Bangley never wished to be elsewhere — he was prepared for the apocalypse before it happened and didn’t have anyone to lose. Finding contentment in one’s current home requires overcoming the grief of what was lost in addition to abandoning phantom hopes. Grand Junction dispels the fantasy of an out-of-reach paradise, and Cima helps Hig move on from his grief.
Hig learns his lesson after Grand Junction, which suggests that dispelling the myth of something better — rather than letting go of the past — is the catalyst for contentment. This outcome seems inconsistent with the amount of time devoted to his love story, which emphasizes the importance of letting go. Because the plot failed to unify its components into one narrative, the resulting film is visually beautiful and touching but follows a meandering and unclear trajectory.
