Movie Review: The Dog Stars

The Dog Stars is a Ridley Scott film, so of course I went to see it. It turns out that he's suffering from the same malady that all our other normally excellent filmmakers are suffering from: no one can check them. No one could tell the James Cameron that Avatar 3 was a heaping pile of boring, derivative crap. No one could tell the Steven Spielberg that Disclosure Day didn't need to be made. And who the hell is going to tell Ridley Scott that his so-called thriller is a boring vignette of a whitewashed dystopia?
 
So we get from Ridley Scott a post-apocalyptic dystopian future. I was going to say "without zombies," but he has reduced the bands of feral survivors in the world into sub-humans that act like fast zombies; they don't speak, they destroy whatever they touch, they burn any building they find, and they attack anyone else on sight. Josh Brolin's character even calls them roaches to round out the sub-humanification of them.
 
That is, the esteemed Mr. Scott has given us a zombie movie wherein he's decided to focus on the human drama. In this case we have a sad-sack main character who serves mostly as a camera. He's sad about his pregnant wife whom he lost to the plague some five years previously. Worse than a camera, he was written with hideous character wobbles that serve whatever whimsy Mr. Scott has. So in one case, he's aghast at taking the life of "roaches", but at the Grand Junction airport, he goes out of his way to backtrack just so he can fire bomb the airport from the air. Sometimes he's the optimist carrying the movie's spirit of possibility and the future, and at other times he's gliding his purposefully stalled plane toward a mountainside and certain death because he just can't go on. We're not talking about character evolution here; the movie takes place over a couple of weeks.
 
There is no story per se. The movie is one long vignette. It's our camera, the main character, in one scene after another. The old writer's criticism comes to mind: and then this happens. Stuff just happens in this movie with the barest connective threads or logic of plot mechanics. So watching this movie is like watching a bunch of skits. The main character is written sort of like a bored billionaire. He has no real practical concerns. He just can't decide how to proceed. There's always enough gas and food. There's a joke here and there about having coffee or cigarettes, but that is the extent to which Mr. Scott's dystopia is penurious. Maybe that's what insanely rich people think the dark dystopia is really like.
 
My point is that it doesn't feel so dystopian. It's more cultural elitism. If you were raised well, with good values, you'll find a way to live with plenty of food and supplies.  The great unwashed simply become zombies. I suspect that in focusing on the human drama, Ridley gave us this genteel dystopia so none of the annoying details of the collapse of civilization get in the way of telling that oh so human story. Unfortunately, I found the lack of realism--verisimilitude for the snoberatti--distracting.
 
There is one objectively crazy sequence at the Grand Junction airport. Allison Janney gives a strong performance as the matriarch of a cannibalistic totalitarian cult. It was a wild sequence that entertained, but I couldn't help but think of how derivative it was of Station Eleven. In fact, a lot of the set pieces in the movie felt like little pilferings from various dystopias. The rabid, bald, zombie-like survivors seem plucked from World War Z. And in keeping with Mr. Scott's notion of genteel dystopia, none of the four main characters got so much as a scratch as they fought their way out of that place with bullets, fire, and grenades.
 
My point is that this movie is a string of largely unconnected sequences that do not tell any particular story. They take place in a sanitized dystopia that never felt real to me. They center on a hang-dog man who behaves so inconsistently that he's not much of a character per se. When the ending came, it didn't land with me. The movie just stopped. I'd be surprised if anyone found it affecting.
 
I was very disappointed in this movie, and I would save you from a similar experience.