*/****
starring Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce
screenplay by Mark L. Smith, based on the novel by Peter Heller
directed by Ridley Scott
by Walter Chaw I’m so sad about Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars, an adaptation of a Peter Heller book I rather like by one of the directors who would most benefit from reading a book. The screenplay is credited to Mark L. Smith but has Scott’s fingerprints all over it, from its slowest-kid-in-class exposition to its simpleminded, overly literal flashbacks to its abundance of illegible, gracelessly inserted action sequences, which could only be motivated by the elderly insecurity that has settled over his work. Does The Dog Stars have atmosphere, at least? I’m not sure there’s been an atmospheric Ridley Scott film since 1987’s Someone to Watch Over Me. Does it have a claim to relevance? I didn’t even know it was coming out until everyone was obliterating it–and remember, I’m a fan of the book, and watching movies is my job. All of which is to say that The Dog Stars is at once sluggish and maniacally energetic; lugubrious and bombastic; beautifully shot and difficult to follow. A modern Ridley Scott joint, in other words. The guy who thought the only thing wrong with Alien is that it didn’t have enough explaining. I’m pretty sure Scott didn’t read Heller’s book. Bless his heart.
Hig (Jacob Elordi) and Bangley (Josh Brolin) live at the Erie Municipal Airport in Colorado, about half an hour from where I live. A plague has wiped out most of humankind, and the two of them have holed up, armed to the gills, in an uneasy partnership against roving bands of suspiciously Native American-seeming marauders. You will say “no,” these hooting, face-painted, leather-clad savages are more like, say, the War Boys in a George Miller pocky-pocalypse, to which I will reply that you can either choose to acknowledge racist tropes that have damaged entire minority populations since the dawn of cinema, or you can just keep on perpetuating them, as is your right and privilege as a mediocre white man angry about fuck knows what. Hig has a dog, Jasper, who is a blue heeler in the book and…not that in the movie. A detail no one will think significant, except that blue heelers have very specific personalities that make them particularly interesting companions in a survival situation. This is probably why Miller gave Mad Max a blue heeler in The Road Warrior and probably why Jasper is not one in this film, which makes me want to ask why it’s avoiding comparisons there, yet a comparison to the Mad Max saga is the only defense for the behaviour and appearance of the baddies. Anyway, Hig hears a mysterious radio signal from Grand Junction and takes to the skies to investigate it. He picks up rancher Cima (Margaret Qualley) and her dad, Pops (Guy Pearce), along the way. Also, there’s a settlement of Mennonites, led by Benedict Wong.
I want to say that Elordi is catching a lot of heat for his patented handsome sadboi turn but is, in fact, spectacular in The Dog Stars. I think he’s a star who hasn’t had a chance to shine, having been shoehorned into emo gigs where brooding is mainly what’s required of him. I buy it when he’s thinking, when he’s hurt; early sequences in The Dog Stars of Hig flying with his faithful pup offer glimpses of the adult performance Elordi’s capable of giving, and the kind of movie this should be. It starts to feel like a running joke: the nerdy buddy who keeps walking in on his jock friend about to kiss the girl. In this instance, the girl is “nuance.” Cockblock: The Movie. Hig has lost his wife to the world-ending plague. In the book, he suffocates her with a pillow. In the film, he pushes a button. You could glean a lot of insight from the difference. One is intimate. Awful, of course, but an illustration of the terrible labour–the responsibility–of love. The other is you pushed a button. In the book, Jasper dies of old age sleeping next to Hig at their favourite fishing spot. In the film, faceless intruders suddenly attack, and Jasper acquits himself heroically. Crucially, it’s heavily implied that the attack is precipitated by Hig being inattentive to his surroundings and distracted by the possibility of life in Grand Junction. The former is sad in the same way you realize a pet is in your life for a very short time, but you are in your pet’s life for all of theirs. When Hig tells Pops, “My dog died,” to explain why he’s left a relatively safe shelter to explore what’s left of a crumbling world, it doesn’t mean much on screen, but it means a lot in the novel. Do you see the difference? In the film, Hig fucks up because he’s daydreaming about other people. He fucks up, and his pal is killed. Why does he want to leave? Why doesn’t he beat himself up over this? What motivates him initially, and what motivates him now?
I know The Dog Stars is getting pilloried for being slow-paced, but it actually moves too quickly. Picture Witness, but every few minutes a massive battle breaks out on Eli’s farm, John Book armed with a machine gun and night vision in hot pursuit of shadowy figures shouting 1950s war whoops. If you think that sounds even better, have I got the movie for you! More accurately, The Dog Stars is exhausting, whiplashing as it does between Heller’s soulful ideas about loss and mortality and Scott’s non-ideas about, “Well, let’s blow some stuff up, shall we?” In the book, Bangley is almost killed in a skirmish relayed after the fact, one in which he managed to stave off a couple dozen invaders. In the film, it’s fifty, and there’s a rocket launcher involved and we witness every gunshot, throat slash, and massive explosion. Suddenly we’re forced to wonder how the hell Bangley survived. Why did this become a season finale of the Jack Reacher show? In the book, man, that was a close call, and Bangley takes weeks to recover, though he never fully does. Thank goodness Hig came back when he did. In the film, he meets Hig with a drink and a jaunty jig that makes everyone laugh. A quick stitching-up, taken with a manly grunt, and he’s fine–oh, and, hey, now he can play the guitar. Remember that joke where the patient asks the doctor if he’ll be able to play the piano after surgery, and the doc says “yes,” and the man says, “That’s odd, because I never could before”? Here’s that joke told by someone who doesn’t understand it.
I don’t need or want an adaptation to hew to the events described in its source material with total fidelity, but I do want it to understand the source material. Imagine the version of this film that takes a deep breath and holds it before letting it out, real slow and steady. Imagine, in other words, the Robert Redford-directed version of this film. Imagine if, as in the novel, Hig has lost everything (breathe in), and one night, he loses his dog (breathe out). He spends the next day afraid to look under the covers at the open camp they’ve laid out beneath the wide Colorado sky, talking to himself about when Jasper was a puppy and everything was still possible, all the while desperate not to notice his dog not coming when he calls him (breathe in). He summons the will to bury Jasper by the river and flies home to tell his partner that he’s decided to chase a ghost in his rickety old scrapheap of a Cessna (breathe out). “You’ll run out of fuel before you get there,” his partner says, and Hig doesn’t answer, because he knows he’s buying a one-way ticket to join his wife and dog (breathe in). You see where I’m going with this? I’m saying I wish a grown-up had made The Dog Stars and not a lamentably prolific 90-year-old determined to show you where the alien came from. For fuck’s sake, Sir Ridley. Breathe out.
