A post-apocalyptic world that feels just one wrong turn away
Unlike many post-apocalyptic movies set in scorched-earth wastelands, the world left in the wake of a deadly flu outbreak in “The Dog Stars” is still pretty much recognizable. The story takes us to 2035, a not-so-distant future, where much of Earth’s population has been decimated and many survivors live with a debilitating blood disease. In the mountains of Colorado, remnants of once-thriving communities remain: roads, buildings, an airstrip, and isolated homesteads.
If they’re lucky, the not-so-lucky few can still take a swig of Coca-Cola, light a cigarette, or pop a tape into a Walkman.
And it’s this semblance of normalcy that makes it easy to imagine that this future isn’t out of the realm of possibility—that we could be just one wrong turn away from something like this. But come to think of it, maybe we have.
Just around the corner
The Peter Heller novel on which the film is based on predates COVID-19 by about eight years, but its premise feels more immediate now than it did in 2012. “Well, it’s around the corner, isn’t it, really,” director Ridley Scott says in a recent virtual conference.
“I’m a news hound, so I watch the global news twice a day, and a lot of this is happening already,” he adds. “We just put our blinkers on—on every level, on climate change—but worse, chaos in certain territories around the world.”
Guy Pearce, who plays Pops—a wary and unyielding man guarding his canyon home against outsiders—couldn’t help but make the same connection. Having “just come off the back of COVID,” working on the film was “pretty interesting”—not because the pandemic was such a “strange, shocking wake-up call” that the whole world experienced at the same time.
“I think the setting in our film is far more extreme, obviously, but it just feels like it’s not that far away,” he says.
Scott says he didn’t want to turn the film into a documentary. And indeed, “The Dog Stars” isn’t so much a cautionary tale about the end of the world as it is a look at what happens to people when the world as we know it is gone. The apocalyptic setting becomes a “platform” for exploring what Scott calls “the empathy, sympathy, and humor” of human behavior.
“Entertainment should also challenge you,” he points out. “You can’t just sit there grinning at some stupid movie…when it kind of starts telling you something, the film starts speaking to you.”
Like an odd couple
Survival may be the most basic requirement, but it isn’t the only thing keeping the protagonists going.
Hig, played by Jacob Elordi, is a young pilot still grieving the death of his wife. Together with his beloved dog, Jasper, he frequently takes his Cessna on scouting missions to gather food and supplies. And in it all, he hopes against hope to track down other survivors or, at the very least, some trace of humanity beyond the deserted airstrip he calls home.
While Hig has a more romantic—almost poetic—response to his grief, Bangley, played by Josh Brolin, channels his into anger and hyper-vigilance. Cold, sardonic, and perfectly content to stay where he is, the former Marine tempers Hig’s optimism with pragmatism. A reluctant protector, if you will.
Here we have two men who couldn’t be more different in how they handle loss. But the new reality they find themselves in leaves them with no other choice but to rely on each other to survive. And in the process, they form an unlikely—and sometimes amusing—bond.
“Jacob and Josh’s characters live their lives with a degree of humor, even comedy. It’s like an odd couple having to live together and tolerate each other indefinitely,” Scott says of their relationship, which “is injected with a real heart”—something he notes not all movies in the genre have.
Signs of life
While post-apocalyptic fiction typically leans into themes of desolation, “The Dog Stars” shows how that can lead to loneliness, and perhaps eventually, to a reconnection with nature. Indeed, despite the dire lack of human life, the world remains beautiful—perhaps, curiously enough, even more so in its absence.
The mountains are lush, the birds sing, and herds of bison mow down everything in their path. It’s as if nature is saying that what it gives, it takes—but also endures.
“Poetry is the visual language,” Scott says, pointing to a scene in which he deliberately kept the birds in the frame. When Hig arrives at his house, “there’s a pelican sitting on a dumpster,” with three more flying overhead.
And when Hig takes off in his plane, searching for signs of life, the view from above could very well remind him that, despite everything, life is already right there before him.
