If I had a nickel for every movie that’s in theaters that features a white guy and a dog, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but you know the rest. For clarity, The Dog Stars is the one with the handsome dude with a five-o’clock shadow, who flies a plane, and is haunted by his past.
The Stars
So despite a generally disinterested yawn that began when I booked the tickets and lasted until I sat down in the theater, I still needed to give this movie a fair shot. And the movie knows it. Ridley Scott knows it. So the movie begins, and really sustains, some fantastic cinematography and camera work. Sweeping shots of the rocky mountains, snow and clouds and the majesty of nature, all on full display, all benefiting from the presence of a flying airplane giving a reason for an elevated camera placement. It’s great.
What’s more, the nighttime scenes were brilliant as well. Not like, ‘brightly lit’ brilliant, but like, ‘wow someone knows what they’re doing!’ brilliant. Everything was easy to see, and despite the lack of sunlight, the film captures those scenes really well. To underscore their grasp of lighting, there’s an incredible action scene in the middle of the movie where Josh Brolin fights off a small army at night, armed just with night vision. It was a real “I’m Him” performance by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt in a movie that’s been truly elevated by his work.
The Dogs
So The Dog Stars is a movie set in the post-apocalypse, and I am a sucker for post-apocalyptic movies. A lot of these movies tend to set their stories in largely urban areas, a visual cemented by I am Legend and The Road, but a lot of the best ones are road trip movies. Think The Book of Eli, or Mad Max, or The Road. In all of these movies, though, the post-apocalyptic infrastructure visuals are a key reason that the movie really feels post-apocalyptic. There’s only really one urban scene in The Dog Stars in the first act, but the rest of the locations are simply isolated. Sure, there’s a bit of technology bootstrapping throughout, but it really just felt like Jacob Elordi was flying between a few locations that were far away from everything else. If you squint, I could convince you that the movie was basically 2026 Detroit and the surrounding areas. Y’know?
But that decision is excusable. Maybe it was an active decision to not lean into the existing visuals. In a sense, this movie felt like a Western. A lonely drifter befriends a grizzled rancher and his cute daughter, is loved by the local farmers, and fights Indians and Mexicans.
Oh, yeah. Almost forgot. Whiteboi Elordi and Josh Brolin go ham on two sets of antagonists: horse-riding, feathers-in-their-hair, war cry whooping Indians. Not even Native Americans- I’m not gonna fucking politically correct this movie for their sake. You’re just lucky I don’t call them a fucking slur.
Thanks to my new movie buddy (for legal reasons I have to inform you that he was not popping Zyns when we met, but in fact putting on earplugs because he correctly anticipated that the movie was going to be loud), I learned there was also a group of antagonists who were MS-13 coded. Y’know. Those bad, bad people crossing the borders in their caravans. And hooooo boy, Josh Brolin, the ex-Marine, enjoyed mowing them down and then dancing in his underwear while their bodies decomposed around him.
Conclusion Pt 1
I recently complained about how annoyed I was with Project Hail Mary’s elongated ending, and I had similar brain itch as this movie inched towards its end. I think, though, that the reason this movie felt like it went on too long can be attributed to the first act. The movie’s beginning is dedicated to Jacob Elordi, the dog, and Josh Brolin. It kicks off the big adventure, but there was little to no enticing emotional build up. Love interest Margaret Qualley wasn’t even introduced until act 2. So once we get past the big climax, the movie has to fast track a bunch of emotional development because there was no groundwork- or at least none that we cared about.
My friend and I had a little conversation about why the movie lacked any emotional impact, but it’s not a topic that needs me to mansplain. Instead, I’ll point you to a blog that I think is a much more appropriate voice to tell you why. Spoiler: feminism.
Funny enough, I watched The Substance for the first time between watching The Dog Stars and writing the review for the latter movie. It feels like such a divine intervention when I do shit like this and juxtaposition a movie made by women and a movie made by an old white guy. First off, tell me why a movie with a lot of Qualley nudity and booty close-ups felt less sexist than a movie where Qualley bares, at most, a bit of cleavage? Second, this movie was so flat and narrow that the poor woman got zero chance to really act. There’s just no room to display the sheer energy she brought to The Substance. As a confession, these are my first two Qualley movies, an insane fact considering how many fantastic movies she’s been in and even more insane for a guy who says he’s a ‘movie guy’. Shame on me.
Conclusion Pt 2
Anywho, this review only exists in this magnitude, and wasn’t some half-assed effort like some of my other recent or upcoming reviews because of my new buddy. This dude was in my DMs saying shit like “Looking forward to your Dog Stars review 😌”, so I figured I owed him.
I rated The Dog Stars
YMMV
I watched this movie in theaters, but it feels like it’ll hit Hulu and not HBO.
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