The Dog Stars

 Progress and catastrophe are the two sides of the same coin.
— Hannah Arendt 

At almost eighty-nine, Ridley Scott continues to make films with a technical mastery it would be unfair not to acknowledge. He knows how to frame a landscape. He knows how to stage an explosion. He knows how to use light as few others do. The Dog Stars is, visually, at times a beautiful film: the skies above the Rockies, the great rationalist buildings of Rome’s EUR district emptied of every function and filled with nothing, Hig’s Cessna cutting through the air like a relic from an earlier geological era. Some images have an almost painterly quality, a three-dimensionality that the flat screen rarely allows. 

Too bad that surrounding those images is a screenplay that seems to have been written in a rushed afternoon, probably by someone who had read Peter Heller’s novel and decided to preserve its emotional structure while removing everything that made it interesting. 

The dialogue is, with remarkable consistency, a disaster. 

These are not simply bad lines. They are lines that seem incapable of trusting the viewer for even a second: the characters explain what they feel, explain what they are about to do, explain what what they have just done meant. The screenplay leaves nothing unresolved, nothing open to interpretation, nothing that has not already been chewed up and served in digestible form. It is the kind of writing that makes you want to ask: why? Why waste actors like these — Elordi has an impressive physical presence, and the character of Bangley could have been something — only to give them lines that would seem excessive even in a family adventure film from 1994? 

The first part is, without mincing words, boring. Scott insists on Hig’s solitude, the muted landscapes, the silence after the catastrophe. The problem is not slowness itself — slowness can be a perfectly legitimate aesthetic choice — but that this slowness produces nothing. Nothing accumulates beneath the surface. Hig fishes, flies, looks at the dog, remembers his dead wife. The screenplay asks him to carry the weight of an existential grief that the writing does not know how to make concrete. It tells us about it, repeatedly. It never manages to make us feel it. 

The film improves — considerably, honestly — when it shifts into action mode. The cannibal trap sequence is the most successful of all: there is genuine tension, a sense of danger that does not need to be explained because it can be seen, and Scott shows that he can still construct a set piece with rhythm and geometry. The escape that follows is probably the moment when The Dog Stars becomes the film it could have been throughout. But it isn’t. 

And so it is natural to wonder whether there is something more underneath. Whether the film is doing something conceptual with its material. 

The honest answer is: almost. 

The Dog Stars offers us a small map of human possibilities after the end. Hig and Bangley’s militarized airport: isolation as strategy. Pops and Cima’s house: the family turned into a bunker. The Mennonite community: the attempt — anachronistic, stubborn, perhaps the only dignified one — to preserve a form of collective life. The cannibals’ refuge: community as a system of predation. Grand Junction: the promise that something still exists somewhere else. The EUR: civilization as an architectural skeleton from which the social body has been removed. 

This geography is more eloquent than the screenplay. The great rationalist buildings of Rome filmed empty say something that none of the film’s dialogue manages to say: the apocalypse is not necessarily the destruction of things, but the separation of things from the function they once had. The Congress Centre remains standing, but there is no one left to meet there. 

It is a visually powerful intuition. Scott, however, does not seem to fully realize it, or perhaps he realizes it and chooses not to pursue it, because pursuing it would mean making a different film — a more uncomfortable one, colder, less mainstream. 

A possible counterpoint to The Dog Stars is Jacqueline Zünd’s Don’t Let the Sun. The two films imagine two different forms of the end of the world: in the first, civilization has physically disappeared; in the second, it is still standing but has already lost the ability to produce authentic relationships. Hig obsessively searches for a voice, a human being, a community; Jonah, by contrast, lives in a system in which another person’s presence can be bought and simulated. In both, then, the real catastrophe is not the destruction of the world, but the crisis of the relationship. The difference is that Zünd takes the question all the way to its ontological dimension, while Scott resolves it in the more reassuring form of hope: after the end, all you need is to find someone with whom to begin again. 

Because The Dog Stars, despite everything, wants to be a fairy tale. 

Not an innocent one: there are cannibals, corpses, blood diseases and enough ammunition to satisfy an army of genre enthusiasts. But structurally, emotionally, ideologically, it is a fairy tale: the melancholic protagonist, the faithful dog, the woman to be found, the father to overcome, the villains to defeat, the community to save, the hope to reaffirm. Scott has explicitly stated that he wanted to avoid total desolation, that he wanted to leave room for optimism. A legitimate choice. But also the choice that drains the film of its possible radicalism. 

Because The Dog Stars depicts a world in which human beings have been reduced to defending themselves, preying on one another, surviving in increasingly primitive forms — and then concludes that as long as the capacity to love remains, it is possible to begin again. It is such a simple answer that it becomes almost irresponsible in relation to the question the film could have asked. 

The question was: what remains of the idea of man when there is no longer a society to define it? 

Scott’s answer is: love. Trust. Community. 

Perhaps. But what kind of community? 

The film never really proves why. And above all, it never proves that the man who emerges on the other side is truly different from the one who was there before. Scott can imagine the end of civilization perfectly well. He cannot imagine anything — possible or impossible — after it. 

This is not a problem with the genre. Post-apocalyptic cinema has produced works of considerable complexity. The problem is that The Dog Stars cannot decide what it wants to be: too contemplative to be a satisfying action film, too action-driven to become the existential meditation its first part seems to promise, too optimistic to truly confront the material it has been given. 

The result is a disproportionate film: visually large, narratively small. A handful of memorable sequences surrounded by a great deal of mediocrity. A geography of interesting ideas inhabited by embarrassing dialogue. 

What remains, in the end, is above all the image of an old airplane flying over an emptied world. It is a beautiful image. Too bad the film does not quite know why. 

There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
— Walter Benjamin