Dog Stars, The
Entry updated 7 September 2026. Tagged: Film.
Film (2026). Scott Free Productions, 20th Century Studios. Directed by Ridley Scott. Written by Mark L Smith from Peter Heller's novel The Dog Stars (2012). Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt. Music Harry Gregson-Williams. Cast includes Josh Brolin, Jacob Elordi, Allison Janney, Guy Pearce, Margaret Qualley and Benedict Wong. 118 minutes.
We are cued at the very beginning to keep in mind that we are watching a movie: the pre-credit studio credit for The Dog Stars replicates an 1980s version of 20th Century Studios/20th Century Fox's logo, accompanied by the famous fanfare originally composed by Alfred Newman (1900-1970) in 1933. We are to be cast back. With reverence.
If the evocation of beauty can be seen as ceremonious, a second cue comes immediately. Superbly filmed at what seems to be an utter silence of dawn, the ruins of a small airstrip are examined in a long tracking shot as slowly as though we were tracing the church of a disappeared world. From the many Post-Holocaust films that we may have already seen, films cast indelibly in our mind's eye visions of the Near Future, we remember this aftermath world: reflected, reborn, redoubled in the beauteous camera work from The Dog Stars' cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (1980- ). Something terrible has happened here, though not recently, maybe a decade ago.. Halfway through the movie we are given a flash glimpse of a document dated 2035, which reassuringly confirms our sense that we are not being tricked, that we are not entrapped in a Godgame polder, that the beauty we are witnessing is not manufactured, like yet another thematic sequel to The Truman Show (1998). Indeed, it might be argued that the heart of the film is to make real through a granular beauteousness some of the many insecurely filmed, cardboardy mises en scene that clutter up so much post-apocalypse cinema. So before the first human is glimpsed, we "know" we are in a "real" world to come, probably post-Pandemic. This proves to be the case.
The slow camera now focuses on a human, a mechanic named Hig (Elordi) easefully readying his plane, a 1956 Cessna 182, for flight; it may be that it is only half-consciously we recognize that only a purely mechanical plane like this – with no solid-state electronics; not controlled by nanoworld-dependent Technology of little use in a post-disaster world – could possibly still fly. As Hig takes off, accompanied by his highly intelligent dog companion Jasper (played variously by three dogs), the camera picks up a second figure, his human companion Bangley (Brolin), an ex-marine and exponent of survivalism (see Survivalist Fiction), keeping an eye open from his watchtower perch.
After flying over some ravishing terrain, Hig lands on an abandoned highway in post-holocaust Denver, Colorado, which resembles western cityscapes featured in the Television series The Last of Us (2022-current) (see also Ruins and Futurity) and elsewhere. He picks up supplies, including Medicines, from various municipal buildings; visits the apartment where his wife and child died in the Pandemic flu, communing with her imagined ghost; refuels; takes to the air again. Denver is well-supplied with survivor's necessities, confirming our sense that we have undertaken a tour of cinematic renderings of the near future after the pandemic: which is to say deeply unreal vision of what a post-disaster future might look like. But The Dog Stars is too intelligently filmed, and its leisureliness is too sacerdotal, for us to fail to understand that any homage to a false future is deliberate. Hig now flies into new terrain, arriving at a sustained and sustainable Mennonite farming community, with many healthy children, where he leaves some supplies. He then returns to the airfield, which may be meant to represent the real Erie Municipal Airport in the piedmont north-west of Denver.
This routine is clearly well-established, and it is clear that Hig is deeply restless, especially after raiders kill his beloved Jasper, as we knew would happen. Hig has in fact heard a radio signal, apparently emanating from Grand Junction airport a few hundred miles west, which may signal the perseverance of some form of "civilization", and after disputatious exchanges with Bangley, who remains on guard against feral survivors, he takes off westwards into gorgeously filmed mountains that do not much resemble the Rockies (The Dog Stars was filmed in the Dolomites and elsewhere in Italy). The Cessna develops an oil leak and he crash-lands in a shallow valley. He discovers a tunnel leading to a hidden farm, where Pops (Pearce), an armed farmer, and his daughter Cima (Qualley), a medical practitioner, live in sunshine and in shadow (see Pastoral). Pops is unfriendly at first; Cima is not. Unwilling for Hig to leave, she nevertheless helps him ready his plane for departure. Pops comes round and helps too.
At this point The Dog Stars suddenly bifurcates. Erie is invaded by a large band of armed scavengers, all similarly ungarbed except for tribal markings; at the same time, a band of marauders dressed in Cowboys-and-Indians cosplay attacks the farm, forcing Hig and Cima and Pops to escape in the Cessna. As all four main protagonists of The Dog Stars are crack shots, dozens of Red Shirts from the SF Megatext are killed. Bangley topples off his disintegrating watchtower, but we do not see him actually die (therefore he is alive). Hig and the others reach Grand Junction airport, and are allowed to land. From outside, the terminal, which is utterly spick and span, seems to have time-travelled from the early 1950s; inside, a cosplay horde of revellers in stained-glass attitudes overfills the transit lounge, like figures out of a late film by Federico Fellini (1920-1993). (That this entire sequence was filmed in Rome at the Cinecittà studios, where Fellini did much of his work, again confirms the homage-irradiated doubleness of The Dog Stars.) The surreal strangeness of the scene – almost always a sign in American post-disaster cinema that a Utopia has soured into a murderous Dystopia – puts Hig and the others on guard. He is now introduced to Darlene (Janney), dressed in a highly suspicious dominatrix version of 1950s stewardess gear, who tells them they have been ensnared in the cannibalistic utopia that she commands, and that only Cima will be spared for her medical expertise. But Hig sets Darlene afire, and they all escape, blowing the terminal up from the air.
They return to Erie. They find Bangley making slightly heavy weather of bandaging his wounds. Cima takes care of him. The four protagonists now constitute a post-holocaust American family. They fly to the Mennonite farm, where the amiable patriarch Aaron (Wong) makes them welcome. A musical celebration ensues. Gruff grubby Bangley picks up a guitar and joins in, and the amateur bandstand thrums with a sense of achieved frontier-adjacent community, as in a surprising number of films by John Ford (1894-1973), who is as clearly homaged here as Fellini earlier. Dusk falls. Hig and Cima plight their troth under the stars, at which they gaze, the Dog Stars in particular, in memoriam Jasper.
As a narrative, The Dog Stars may seem flaccid, with the assertion of Pastoral at the end being its only (mild) novelty. But as a story whose main function is to give passage through an archipelago of homages, it seems altogether more engaging; and far more sympathetic than either Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's Project Hail Mary (2026) or Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day (2026), both of them being touristic re-enactments of previous conventions about the filming of things to come. It is a marker of how far we have ascended into cinema's second full century: for so late has the world become that it can be a form of reverence to visit old tellings that never came true: that making them beauteous may these days constitute a legitimate honouring of the futures we used to tell. [JC]
links
previous versions of this entry