It’s the end of the world as we know it in “The Dog Stars,” and everyone feels — well, not fine exactly, but, you know, fine? Alive, hanging in there, taking it one day at a time. Things could be better, which goes without saying in the aftermath of a flu pandemic that has wiped out most of the planet’s human population, but the four principals here could also be dead, so there’s that. That shrugging, slightly bereft air of just-getting-by is the prevailing mood of Ridley Scott‘s post-apocalyptic survival story, and it’s a tough one to sustain dramatically, much less with any sense of intrepid adventure. Somewhat aptly released at the tail end of a long, loud movie summer, this is a surprisingly low-energy, low-incident blockbuster; you’d appreciate its mellow, character-oriented approach if it gave you any real characters to hold onto.
Peter Heller’s popular 2012 source novel largely did. Concentrated and eventful, it brought Jack London-style terseness and lyricism, as well as some mordant gallows humor, to the oft-solitary saga of Hig, a qualified mechanic eking out a life on an abandoned airstrip in rural Colorado, less than a decade after the fateful plague. (The year in the film is given, most pessimistically, as 2035. Start stockpiling now.) On the page, Hig’s first-person descriptions of his everyday adventures, and of the waning natural world around him, had an honest, melancholy soul to them. That voice doesn’t carry over to the adaptation by screenwriter Mark L. Smith — something of a specialist in survivalist drama, having also scripted “The Revenant” and “The Midnight Sky” — which forgoes narration altogether; the film bets on Jacob Elordi‘s blokey, slightly sad-eyed charm to fill in the gaps.
