Elordi Have Mercy
Never mind the Euphoria — Ridley Scott’s surprisingly sensitive adaptation of a dystopian novel gives the actor a perfect strong-silent-type showcase
Somewhere just outside the town of Erie, Colorado, you’ll find the rusted-out remains of an airfield that’s home to a boy and his dog. The “boy” is Hig (Jacob Elordi), a twentysomething former mechanic. The dog is a Belgian Malinois named Jasper. The world they currently live in is both naturally majestic — all that bucolic Rocky Mountain High scenery! — and dystopian, having been ravaged by a flu pandemic that’s taken out roughly 95 percent of the population. Most days, Hig and his faithful pooch hop into his Cessna and scour the ruins of downtown Denver for supplies, fly recon missions, help out the local Mennonite community that’s a short flight away.
Sometimes he’ll stop in to the old apartment he shared with his late wife, which has been preserved as a sort of memento mori museum to the days before everything fell apart. Occasionally, Hig turns off the propeller mid-flight and simply lets the plane drift in the air; the fact that he usually does this while pointing the aircraft at a large mountain in Telluride, one with a lot of backstory-related significance, hints at some troubled thoughts. Mostly, though, this stoic gent and his canine best friend return back to base, which they share with a cantankerous old ex-Marine named Bangley (Josh Brolin). Barring the occasional attack from outsiders, it’s a relatively calm and stable existence, all post-apocalyptic things considered.
