The Dog Stars is a post-apocalyptic movie so generic that it just makes sense to start with a generic piece of criticism: Jacob Elordi and Margaret Qualley are two incredibly attractive people who have no chemistry.
It's far from the film's only or worst fault, but complaints of rote thematics, uneven plotting, and awkward scripting can't be expressed with as snappy and oft-cited a phrase. And I wouldn't want to try to be snappy about the movie's attempts to echo Westerns of the past with its treatment of non-verbal, racialized hordes that attack our white heroes.
The choices around race start questionably with a vaguely ethnic pair of young people making their way onto the grounds of the abandoned airport where Hig (Elordi) and Bangley (Josh Brolin) have made their home, before being unceremoniously sniped by the trigger-happy Bangley. "Questionable" soon expands into outright right wing fantasy when a raving gang of heavily tattooed, mostly shirtless Latinos and a warpaint-wearing band of indigenous people who look like they came through The Road Warrior on their way to a John Ford film attack the leads' strongholds. The latter sequence takes place on a ranch and Guy Pearce wears a cowboy hat and fires a revolver just to make crystal clear this is homage, but homage to racism is still racism.
It's hard to say whether it's good or bad for The Dog Stars that the rest of its problems are far more inoffensive, as all that inoffensiveness ultimately delivers one of the most forgettable films in director Ridley Scott's filmography. The failure to convince anyone of the sexual tension between Hig and Cima (Qualley), after he crashlands his plane near her and her father's (Pearce) ranch, is so severe I cannot remember whether this film I saw mere hours ago has them kiss onscreen at any point. I do however distinctly remember thinking "he's got more chemistry with Pearce" as the two quibble about how to correctly use a two-man saw.
A bright spot of contrast doesn't even always shine through, though. When Bangley talks of being more distressed by having wasted the time he could have spent with his wife and daughters while they were alive than their deaths, it's easy to have a kneejerk "telling rather than showing" gripe. Yet on the flip side, we get several flashbacks of Hig's pregnant wife in their still decorated home that he regularly returns to and these instances of "showing" are decidedly worse in their heavy-handedness than Bangley's telling.
The repeated ideological clashes between Hig and Bangley about whether they should attempt to communicate with and perhaps even extend compassion to others, or shoot them down on sight, are textbook. They aren't bad, they're just so boilerplate they disappear from the mind as they happen, or worse they bring to mind better conceived post-apocalyptic narratives (Guy Pearce's presence makes The Rover an inevitable comparison). These arguments also have an abundance of awkwardly sandwiched "fuckin"s between words from both Brolin (who can sell most of them) and Elordi (who sells maybe a third of them).
It's all very standard, serviceable post-apocalyptic stuff that's neither good nor bad enough to be memorable in any way. The irony of The Dog Stars is one of its greatest highlights goes hand in hand with its greatest fault, as the action set pieces with the not-quite faceless mobs of ethnic others have the proverbial juice.
A sequence of Brolin singlehandedly taking on the MS-13 coded swarm is the film's most visually exciting, as it plays out significantly through deep green night vision goggles, with beautiful light trails and shockingly bright blood splatter. The assault on Pearce's ranch is straight out of a classic Western, before transforming into a plane escape reminiscent of Fast and Furious 6's ultralong runway with several stunts worthy of that franchise.
Most memorable of all is an extended scene with Allison Janney as the leader of an apparently utopian commune in which she, with caked on makeup and a pencil-skirted stewardess uniform, introduces a wonderful bit of silliness to the proceedings. She and Scott balance that silliness with real tension, as she waves around cigarettes and martini glasses, to deliver a delightful one-scene wonder performance in the midst of the mediocrity.
There's enough to make The Dog Stars a decent time at the movies if you need to take a Western-loving dad to see something. But the vast majority of what's here is so middling that, even if he likes it, he won't remember it a year from now.
The film opens Friday, August 28, only in movie theaters, via 20th Century Studios. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.