2.5 stars (out of 4)
As far as post-apocalyptic Colorado screen stories go, “The Dog Stars” is better than most. And there are a lot of them out there, from the recent “Elevation” and “Moonfall” to series such as “The Last of Us” and “Paradise.”
Few are actually filmed in Colorado, though. Director Ridley Scott (“Blade Runner,” “Gladiator”) shot his adaptation of the Colorado-set “The Dog Stars” in the Italian Alps. The choice is symbolic of the movie at large, which never really gets under its characters’ skin but looks pretty with its sweeping vistas and flashy gunfights.
This would-be thriller, which opens in IMAX and standard theaters on Friday, Aug. 28, is based on Colorado author Peter Heller’s 2012 debut novel. Unlike the lyrical book, which was much more than its plot, the movie dutifully checks the boxes of its genre while waffling between bloody clashes and quiet vignettes among the good guys (though they’re all lumped together as “cockroaches,” given their shared immunity to a world-ending virus).
Jacob Elordi is a smoldering scarecrow of a man in his Carhartts and heavy brow as he plays mechanic-turned-pilot Hig. He flies around in a junky prop-plane from his home-base airstrip in Erie, which he shares with anxious ex-Marine Bangley (Josh Brolin). Hig occasionally drops into Denver for fuel, food and medicine, where puzzling and supercharged product placement and generic buildings de-fang the feel of a ruined city. Scott can’t be bothered to represent a single Colorado landmark.
Hig, with an automatic rifle always at his side, gathers supplies with his beloved dog Jasper, who rides around with him on a golf cart and represents Hig’s connection a world that made sense. These moments of quiet exploration and tension, which establish Hig’s essential goodness but are occasionally hokey, are soon replaced by his wanderlust of wanting to see what else is out there — ideally, other survivors in a functional mini-society.
After Jasper dies in a chaotic raid on the airstrip, and Hig is again intrigued by a scratchy radio transmission, he decides there’s nothing left for him in Erie. Suddenly, it’s a road movie without a road. Hig’s excursion leaves him stranded in a high country field, minus a runway to take off again. And yet home is always a theme: back at the airstrip, Bangley defends his compound against tattooed, bald, all-male raiders, who are cultishly devoid of humanity (all the better to mow down with rifles, sans audience-guilt, eh?).
By contrast, Hig has begun helping the father-daughter duo Cima (Marget Qualley) and Pops (Guy Pearce). Although he’s generally cast in the vein of classic Western go-alones (he’d be great in a “High Noon” remake), Hig has done little up to this point beyond thousand-year stares, burying his head in his hands and sighing loudly, and flashing back to his late, pregnant wife. The character barely comes alive with his impromptu new family.
Sparkle-eyed, apple-cheeked Qualley and her character’s instant attraction to Hig provide one of the film’s true emotional stakes. And you can’t take your eyes off Pearce, with his white neckbeard and mountain-codger wincing, but the performance is still more mannerism than character study, a plot device in search of a soul.
Each character has lost something dear and brokered a fragile truce with their trauma. But as Cima puts it in a rare moment of insight, no one has a monopoly on grief. You may be the main character in your own story, but it’s everyone’s story now.
Over its draggy, two-hour runtime, the movie stays unconcerned with the tick-tock of how the deadly pandemic destroyed civilization or still threatens some survivors, who take meaningless precautions to stand a few feet apart but never mask up. Rather, it tries to bring us inside the heads of its protagonists, who exude wounded defensiveness before predictably dropping their guards.
There’s pointed commentary — or at least the smack of poignancy — in mentions of measles and vaccines, for example, among children at an otherwise idyllic Mennonite camp to which Hig flies in Sprite and medical supplies. They’re watched over by Aaron (Benedict Wong) who, like his co-stars, is more window dressing than performance and is badly miscast.
A wild, third-act tonal shift and over-the-top Allison Janney performance makes you wonder if Scott wanted to take another route for this sober story, steering from bleakness to surreal satire. But the only reliable show-stealer, beyond the natural beauty we see from Hig’s pilot-perspective, is Brolin’s Bangley. His emotional arc stands out in this otherwise rote-feeling script from Mark L. Smith, a writer who typically knows his way around people-against-nature stories (see “Twisters” and “The Revenant”).
You also needn’t be an expert in Rocky Mountain scenery to see the utter lack of resemblance to Colorado, with the film’s foggy expanses of wide, flat rivers and pillar-like peaks. They double for locations such as Erie, Denver and Grand Junction, but scream “Europe!” from the get-go.
For all its technical confidence and pleasant faces, “The Dog Stars” squanders its actors’ talents and trades true insight for familiar action. There’s little to chew on after the camera pans up to the stars and the screen fades to black — other than why this collection of talent couldn’t produce a film worthy of Heller’s novel.
