The Dog Stars (dir. Ridley Scott)

by Jack Martin | Aug 28, 2026

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 118 mins

UK Distributor: 20th Century Studios

UK Release Date: 26 August 2026

WHO’S IN THE DOG STARS?

Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, Allison Janney, Guy Pearce, Benedict Wong, Sebastian Rokison-Woodall, Alara-Star Khan

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Ridley Scott (director, producer), Mark L. Smith (writer, producer), Michael Pruss and Cliff Roberts (producers), Harry Gregson-Williams (composer), Erik Messerschmidt (cinematographer), Sam Restivo and Claire Simpson (editors)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

In a post-apocalyptic future, a former pilot (Elordi) searches for a better life…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON THE DOG STARS?

It’s quite remarkable how Sir Ridley Scott is still such an energetic filmmaker at the age of 88, making big epics like Napoleon and Gladiator II as well as (comparatively) smaller character-based dramas like The Last Duel, House of Gucci and All the Money in the World, all within the last decade. But his latest feature, an adaptation of Peter Heller’s bestselling novel The Dog Stars, might be the one that finally shows his age.

Though it may be as well-polished and certainly as well-shot as any late-game Ridley Scott movie, The Dog Stars suffers heavily from a lethargic script filled with reminders of other movies like it that are much better than this one, characters and dialogue that consistently fall flat, and drama about as light as the air on which our protagonist frequently glides over.

That protagonist is Hig (Jacob Elordi), a young man living in a world that’s been ravaged by a deadly global pandemic, which has left him and a handful of other human survivors behind. Hig and his beloved dog Jasper make regular journeys in his biplane across the pristine Colorado landscapes to gather and deliver supplies to a local Mennonite community, while back at his base he has formed an uneasy alliance with Bangley (Josh Brolin), whose shoot-first-ask-later policy when it comes to wandering outsiders – many of whom have succumbed to a more feral way of life – clashes with Hig’s more idealistic view of what remains of humanity. But after tragedy strikes, Hig decides to take off in search of a safer place to call home, along the way encountering young medic Cima (Margaret Qualley) and her hardened father Pops (Guy Pearce) as well as a few dangerous hordes of humans, feral or otherwise.

For about 85% of the movie, you’re watching a dry and not particularly interesting post-apocalyptic drama. Little of consequence happens throughout much of the film’s first half, save for the inciting tragic incident which is certainly heartbreaking since it involves one of the more lovable cast members, but beyond that it’s mainly just Elordi’s Hig roaming about abandoned cities and buildings, many of which are covered in overgrown grass and roots, and sharing repetitive conversations about retaining one’s humanity in the midst of this extinction event. Mark L. Smith’s script doesn’t have a strong enough emotional centre for the story and character arcs within it to land so efficiently, despite Scott’s reliable directorial vision and the efforts of a talented cast, and certainly not as adequate to prevent the fact that there’s really nothing here that you haven’t seen before in terms of post-apocalyptic cinema.

Visually speaking, and excluding Erik Messerschmidt’s otherwise sharp digital cinematography, this world evokes memories of everything from The Walking Dead to The Last of Us to I Am Legend to the recent Planet of the Apes movies, all or at least many of which do a much finer and more engaging job of post-apocalyptic storytelling. Not only does it make The Dog Stars seem like more of a lifeless copy in terms of its own world-building, but it makes the film a lot duller to watch, because unlike many of those examples there’s very little about these characters or this plot or even this universe that’s gripping enough for it to demand your attention.

That is, until the film reveals its remaining 15% which is when an entirely different, more interesting, and utterly bonkers movie briefly takes over. Throughout, the film frequently runs into the odd issue of turning into a completely different kind of movie – it’ll become close to a zombie movie for one nighttime sequence that feels straight out of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, and a solemn neo-Western the next that comes complete with backwoods ranches and enemies on horseback – but at one junction, it jumps ship entirely into an aesthetic, series of performances and even a filmmaking style that makes it feel like a deleted scene from Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer. It’s already fascinatingly weird given how this sequence feels so out of place next to everything else in the film, but as it keeps going and becomes increasingly insane, you realise that a movie set within this particular pocket of the world and with these types of kooky characters would have made for something far more entertaining than the shockingly dull one that we’re largely stuck with.

Sadly, 15% accounts to very little of the overall picture, and as soon as we’re thrust into this crazy and wild sub-section, we’re spit right back out into the main plot and its band of uninteresting survivors. It’s like being given a tiny high from a powerful drug before being pulled all the way back down, leaving us begging for more because the world we’ve come back to simply isn’t as ecstatic. In this case, it further illustrates how The Dog Stars lacks so much in terms of its own drama, character dynamics, world-building and morals that it’s easily outshone by an absolutely barmy side-mission, one that arguably makes less sense than most other things in this movie but would have at least made for a more engaging and even memorable viewing experience.

As far as Ridley Scott’s more recent movies go, this is probably his weakest since Exodus: Gods and Kings, though even that film – as boring as it also was – had more to it that’ll be remembered than this meandering slog. Hopefully, though, the nearly 90-year-old has at least one more interesting movie left in him before heading to the stars himself.

SO, TO SUM UP…

The Dog Stars is an unfortunate slog that lacks anything interesting in terms of its characters, storytelling, and redundant post-apocalyptic world-building, save for a few all too brief flashes of a much wilder and more entertaining movie than the one we’re largely stuck with.