REVIEW

Ridley Scott’s ‘THE DOG STARS’ Soars Before a Bumpy Landing

By Matt Oakes · August 25, 2026

One of the most beautifully shot post-apocalyptic movies ever filmed, Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars takes full advantage of its rugged mountain landscapes. Hig (Jacob Elordi), a survivor with a distinctive, beat-up little yellow biplane, rips through the sky with a verdant spread of trees below and jagged, shark-fin peaks above. Scott’s decision to favor real locations and minimal CGI does wonders for the movie’s texture, giving the end of the world a striking beauty that so many modern blockbusters struggle to achieve. When Hig cuts the engine midflight and simply floats, the quiet, empty expanse is almost overwhelming. Between Erik Messerschmidt’s breathtaking aerial photography and Harry Gregson-Williams’ plucky post-rock score, The Dog Stars plays as much like an IMAX nature documentary as a post-apocalyptic adventure.

Adapted from Peter Heller’s 2012 novel of the same name, The Dog Stars blends plenty of familiar post-apocalyptic ingredients. There’s the acoustic folksiness and startling violence of The Last of Us, the philosophical curiosity about what forms in a pandemic’s aftermath found in Station Eleven, and the increasingly shopworn idea, familiar from 28 Days Later, The Walking Dead, and countless other zombie mainstays, that desperate factions of surviving humans are the true monsters, even though The Dog Stars has no zombies to speak of. What it does have are roving bands of tribally tattooed Reapers who whoop, holler, and slaughter indiscriminately. Their broad, faceless savagery, vocal choices, and visual coding feel uncomfortably reminiscent of the dehumanized Indigenous antagonists of old cowboy-and-Indian movies, giving one of the film’s most familiar post-apocalyptic tropes a troublingly retrograde edge.

At times, the movie’s reliance on those familiar genre parts weakens its own identity, particularly in a final act that feels imported from a lesser film. What gives The Dog Stars its own pulse is a simpler question: once you’ve figured out how to stay alive, what exactly are you staying alive for? Survival is not living. You still need something to fight for, someone to return to, or at least someplace worth pointing the plane.

Hig is a mechanic and pilot carving out a life at an abandoned airfield outside Denver alongside fellow survivor and hardcore survivalist Bangley (Josh Brolin). Their little sliver of civilization is its own industrial-junkyard paradise, a land of the lost hunkered down in the middle of all that foggy wilderness. Bangley maintains the perimeter while Hig performs supply runs, usually with his dog Jasper riding copilot. On those runs, Hig stops by a surviving Mennonite village to deliver necessities, which apparently include cases of Sprite for the children. It’s a small detail that tells us more about Hig than any clunky speech about maintaining hope ever could. The movie is good at conveying character that way. Hig sees kids who inherited the end of the world and thinks they could probably use a few sodas.

Elordi is a sturdy leading man, leaning into Hig’s gruff, man-of-few-words exterior without losing the kindness underneath. Hig is also a deeply broken man, increasingly desperate to find something worth carrying on for. Brolin is right in his element as Bangley, whose view of the world has become brutally utilitarian: kill or be killed, shoot first, maybe don’t bother with questions afterward. It’s familiar territory for Brolin, but he fits the role like a well-oiled leather glove. Bangley has mastered survival by reducing his world to a defensible perimeter. Hig keeps pushing past that perimeter, even if he isn’t always sure there’s anything worth finding on the other side.

During his flights, Hig will occasionally cut the engine and let the plane drift silently through the mountain air. At first, we’re never quite sure whether he’s chasing a few minutes of peace, testing fate, or considering pointing the nose directly toward the side of the tallest mountain around. He lost his wife to the virus that tore the world apart, and while he has managed to keep his body alive, the rest of him seems increasingly unconvinced that survival alone is worth the trouble. Jasper, a German Shepherd-ish mutt and an immediate front-runner for best animal performance of the year, is one of the few things tethering him to the ground. He is a Good Boy with a capital G and B, though anyone particularly sensitive to animal violence should proceed with some caution.

A faint radio transmission from Grand Junction finally gives Hig somewhere to go. He has spent years treating that stray signal like proof of some distant Mecca of civilization, and his journey west eventually brings him into the orbit of Cima (Margaret Qualley) and her gruff, overprotective father, Pops (Guy Pearce). Cima has also lost a spouse, and Qualley has excellent chemistry with Elordi as two people who recognize the same hollowed-out space in one another. The movie doesn’t treat her like some magical cure for grief. Their connection is complicated by the people they loved, the people they watched suffer, and the guilt of wondering whether moving forward means leaving those people behind.

Pearce scowls with the best of them as the cantankerous, over-protective Pops, though I do wish the movie had given him more scene work opposite Brolin. A mean, crotchety old-man standoff between those two feels like an obvious pleasure the film strangely denies us. Then again, The Dog Stars is generally at its best when it resists the obvious pleasures and lets things get quiet. Hig floating through the sky with Jasper. Hig and Cima cautiously allowing another person into the fortified remains of their lives. A case of Sprite arriving for kids who have inherited the end of the world. That’s where the movie really sings. Scott lets those moments hang in the air, and I was fully swept up in the first two-thirds because of it.

Then things get weirdly wacky. The tone grows broader, campier, and almost Looney Tunes. The place Hig has built up as the last great beacon of civilization arrives with a strange, over-the-top energy that feels disconnected from the reflective movie surrounding it. One larger shootout gets weirdly video-gamey, an interesting swing from Scott that never quite clicks in the final product. The last act in general struggles with pacing and continuity, and the quiet spell the film worked so carefully to establish breaks apart into something less compelling.

Those missteps are frustrating because Scott otherwise seems unusually invested in the material. This doesn’t feel like an 80-something-year-old filmmaker simply turning up and collecting another credit. There’s care in the locations, the sound, the long stretches of silence, and the attention paid to characters simply existing inside what remains of the world. Even when the bigger scenes get away from him, there’s a pulse here that has been missing from several of his recent efforts.

Maybe the most personal unlock to read The Dog Stars lies in Hig’s habit of killing his plane’s engine. Ridley Scott lost his younger brother Tony Scott (also an accomplished director) to suicide in 2012, and The Dog Stars often feels like the work of an aging storyteller still trying to puzzle out the meaning behind his brother’s death. Hig survived the flu that took out the majority of the world but seems increasingly unconvinced that survival itself is much of a prize. But why does he turn away from oblivion in the last moment? By every outward measure, Hig has won. He has shelter, companionship, purpose, even something approaching peace. And yet none of that necessarily answers the question of whether you want to keep going. Tony Scott, by every conventional measure, had won too. And maybe that’s the question Scott is chewing on here: what happens in that moment when someone decides there’s nowhere left worth going? That moment before stepping out onto the ledge, or turning the key to reignite the plane engine. And maybe, through Hig, he gets to rewrite that tragic ending. The engine cuts. The mountain face looms. But this time the man finds a reason to start it back up. Here, he doesn’t jump.

The Dog Stars doesn’t land the plane perfectly. Its final act is clunkier, louder, sillier, and much less assured than the gorgeous, meditative movie preceding it. But the images are often breathtaking, the score and sound design enveloping, and the cast uniformly strong. More importantly, The Dog Stars understands that refusing to die is not the same thing as living. Sometimes you need another person. Sometimes you need a destination. And sometimes you just need a Good Boy in the copilot seat and enough fuel to keep flying.

CONCLUSION: Predominantly a beautifully photographed post-apocalyptic character study, ‘The Dog Stars’ is at its best when focused on grief, companionship, and what makes survival worth the trouble. When it retreats into more familiar end-of-the-world genre beats, it becomes less effective. Still, an all-star cast led by Jacob Elordi, Margaret Qualley, Josh Brolin, and Guy Pearce makes the journey worthwhile, even if the movie sputters in its all-important closing chapters.