The Dog Stars: new trailer offers hope, horror and limited aviation fuel (movie).

Civilisation has ended again. This time there are no zombies, radioactive mutants or leather-clad gangs arguing over who owns the last petrol station. There is simply Jacob Elordi, an old aeroplane, a heavily armed Josh Brolin and the worrying knowledge that Ridley Scott has been left alone with the apocalypse.

The new trailer for The Dog Stars introduces a world hollowed out by pandemic. The cities are silent, the roads are empty and humanity has been reduced to a scattering of survivors who have sensibly concluded that every unexpected visitor is probably carrying either a disease or a rifle.

Elordi plays Hig, a pilot living at an abandoned airfield with Bangley, a military survivalist played by Josh Brolin. Their arrangement appears practical rather than cosy. Hig flies reconnaissance missions, while Bangley guards the perimeter and looks like a man who considers warning shots an unnecessary expense.

Hig still believes there may be something worth finding beyond their barricades. Bangley believes the outside world contains strangers, and strangers are simply ammunition problems that have learned to walk upright.

The pair have established an efficient little post-apocalyptic household. There is shelter, surveillance, firepower and presumably an agreed rota for checking whether civilisation has unexpectedly grown back overnight.

Then Hig hears a mysterious transmission on his radio.

This is rarely good news in science fiction. Mysterious radio messages have led people towards aliens, abandoned spacecraft, secret laboratories and places where the previous rescue party left several bloodstained helmets. Nevertheless, Hig takes to the air in search of whoever might be broadcasting.

His aircraft is an old Cessna rather than a sleek science-fiction machine. It rattles over forests and ruined landscapes with the reassuring sturdiness of something built before every household appliance required an internet connection and a monthly subscription.

The journey brings Hig into contact with Cima, played by Margaret Qualley, and her father, portrayed by Guy Pearce. Their existence suggests that life beyond the airfield may contain more than looters waiting behind trees, although Ridley Scott films have traditionally advised against becoming too emotionally attached to anyone encountered in an isolated location.

The trailer promises an unusually thoughtful form of cinematic apocalypse. There are guns and explosions, certainly, because society may collapse but the insurance requirements for a major studio production remain robust. Yet the central question is not merely whether Hig can survive. It is whether survival means anything when grief has stripped the world down to routine, fuel calculations and perimeter patrols.

The film is based on Peter Heller’s 2012 novel, in which Hig lives with his dog Jasper, his aeroplane and Bangley. The dog is important. Science fiction has trained audiences to remain emotionally composed while entire planets explode, but place one loyal animal in modest danger and millions of viewers immediately begin threatening the director.

The title itself is taken from the Dog Star, Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. It makes a useful symbol for a story about a man flying towards a distant signal in the hope that something human is still shining beyond the darkness.

Scott is well suited to this material. His films frequently place damaged professionals in hostile environments and ask them to repair something before the landscape, the institution or the local wildlife kills them. Whether it is a commercial spaceship, ancient Rome, Mars or Napoleon’s career prospects, somebody usually has a difficult journey and inadequate emotional support.

The Dog Stars also appears to return Scott to the grubbier, more physical sort of science fiction. The machinery has weight. The settlements look assembled rather than designed. Survival depends upon fuel, distance and whether the man watching the perimeter has remembered where he put the binoculars.

Jacob Elordi’s Hig is a very different sort of post-apocalyptic hero from the traditional wandering bruiser. He is lanky, wounded and visibly more interested in finding human connection than establishing himself as supreme ruler of the abandoned motorway services.

Brolin’s Bangley provides the opposite philosophy. He has looked at the end of civilisation and decided the chief lesson is that he was right to own so many guns. Every survivalist hopes for this moment, the brief golden period when everyone else must admit that the underground ammunition cupboard was not an eccentric use of the conservatory after all.

The supporting cast is formidable. Allison Janney and Benedict Wong appear alongside Qualley and Pearce, which suggests the remaining population has been assembled according to strict dramatic quality controls. If humanity must rebuild, it has at least retained several dependable character actors.

There is, inevitably, something faintly uncomfortable about returning to pandemic fiction so soon after the real world conducted its own poorly organised rehearsal. Empty shops, nervous communities and arguments over supplies no longer feel safely theoretical.

Heller’s story, however, is less interested in the mechanics of disease than in what happens afterwards. What do people preserve when the systems around them vanish? What parts of civilisation are worth carrying forward? Is hope a survival tool, or merely an attractive way to get yourself shot outside the perimeter?

The trailer suggests Scott is taking those questions seriously without forgetting that audiences also enjoy watching aeroplanes skim across spectacular landscapes while Josh Brolin growls practical advice involving firearms.

There is a strong western flavour to proceedings. The airfield becomes a frontier homestead, the Cessna replaces the horse and every patch of woodland may conceal somebody whose social skills deteriorated shortly before the electricity supply.

Here at SFcrowsnest, we approve of an apocalypse with room for silence. Too many ruined worlds resemble theme parks operating at full capacity. The Dog Stars looks prepared to let its emptiness breathe, giving Hig’s search for another voice genuine weight.

The world that was may no longer exist, as the trailer tells us, but humanity has apparently retained aircraft, dogs and Josh Brolin. It is not much of a foundation for civilisation, but we have rebuilt from worse.

The Dog Stars lands in cinemas and IMAX on 28th August 2026.