The Dog Stars: Mark Kermode’s scifi film review (video).

If you have watched Mark Kermode’s video review above, you will already know that The Dog Stars did not exactly cause him to leap from his chair, run into the street and declare Ridley Scott the saviour of civilisation. His verdict is decidedly on the chilly side.

So, having heard from Mark, here is the SFcrowsnest view from our own little fortified compound.

The Dog Stars is the latest film from Sir Ridley Scott, a director who at the age of 88 apparently regards retirement as something that happens to other people. Most directors approaching ninety might consider gardening. Ridley appears more likely to glance at an empty fortnight in his diary and wonder whether he can squeeze in another $100 million movie before lunch.

This time he has adapted Peter Heller’s 2012 novel about a world devastated by a flu pandemic. Jacob Elordi plays Hig, one of the survivors, living at an abandoned Colorado airfield with his dog Jasper and Bangley, a heavily armed former Marine played by Josh Brolin.

Bangley is the sort of chap who looked at the end of civilisation and apparently thought, “Finally, some peace and quiet.”

He has weapons, defensive positions and a straightforward philosophy regarding strangers which can broadly be summarised as shooting them before they have had sufficient time to explain that they are actually very nice people.

Hig is rather more optimistic about the surviving remains of humanity, although considering what remains of humanity keeps trying to kill him, Bangley’s approach does have supporting evidence.

Hig also has an aeroplane, which allows him to fly around the ruined landscape scavenging supplies and looking for signs that civilisation might have left something behind besides tins of beans, assault rifles and people with alarming hobbies.

Eventually, a mysterious radio transmission tempts him beyond his comfortable little apocalypse and towards Grand Junction. There he encounters another isolated household, including a wary father played by Guy Pearce and his daughter Cima, played by Margaret Qualley.

And from here The Dog Stars begins trying to decide exactly what sort of film it wants to be. This is its biggest problem.

Post-apocalyptic drama has become an extraordinarily crowded neighbourhood. We have endured plagues, zombies, fungi, nuclear wars, environmental collapses and assorted occasions when civilisation disappeared because somebody in a laboratory pressed the button labelled DO NOT PRESS.

Consequently, merely showing us abandoned motorways and people rummaging through deserted shops no longer generates quite the chill it once did. The Dog Stars sometimes feels like arriving late at the apocalypse and discovering all the best ideas have already been looted.

You can see traces of The Road, The Last of Us, Station Eleven, 28 Days Later and assorted survivalist thrillers stretching back decades. It is not that Scott copies any particular one of them. It is more that the furniture has become terribly familiar.

Abandoned town? Check. Suspicious armed survivors? Naturally. Marauding lunatics who apparently responded to the collapse of civilisation by immediately opening a branch of Post-Apocalyptic Costumes R Us? Present and correct. What keeps the film alive is Scott himself.

There are sequences where you suddenly remember that this is the man who made Alien, Blade Runner, Black Hawk Down and Gladiator. An attack on the survivors and a later aeroplane escape have that old Ridley Scott physical precision. Things move, explode and intersect in space exactly where they ought to. You can almost imagine younger directors sitting in the cinema taking notes while muttering rude things.

Erik Messerschmidt’s photography also gives Scott some magnificent American wilderness to play with. The empty landscape is often more interesting than the people inhabiting it. Nature has recovered rather nicely from our disappearance, which is possibly not the comforting message humanity was hoping for.

Josh Brolin is probably the film’s greatest asset. Bangley could easily have been Survivalist Bloke Number 6, but Brolin gives him enough humour and humanity to make you miss him whenever the story wanders elsewhere. He looks completely at home surrounded by guns, sandbags and the remains of modern civilisation. If the actual apocalypse occurs next Thursday, finding Josh Brolin should probably be somewhere near the top of your emergency checklist.

Jacob Elordi has the more difficult job. Hig carries most of the film’s grief, loneliness and hope, which means spending considerable periods looking emotionally battered while flying over Colorado. Elordi is perfectly good, particularly in the quieter scenes with Jasper, but the screenplay gives him feelings rather more readily than personality.

Indeed, the dog enjoys one significant dramatic advantage over nearly everybody else: nobody makes Jasper deliver exposition.

Margaret Qualley brings some welcome warmth when she finally appears, while Guy Pearce once again demonstrates his remarkable ability to arrive in genre cinema looking as though he has personally survived whatever catastrophe the screenplay has devised.

Then, late in proceedings, something rather peculiar happens.

Without wandering into spoiler territory, The Dog Stars briefly appears to be invaded by a different movie. Allison Janney turns up amid a sequence so bizarrely heightened that you may wonder whether somebody accidentally changed reels with a David Lynch retrospective.

It is bonkers.

It is also, rather inconveniently, one of the most memorable things in the film. That perhaps tells you everything about The Dog Stars. Whenever it behaves like a conventional prestige post-apocalyptic drama, your attention begins wandering towards thoughts such as whether you switched the kitchen light off before leaving home. Whenever Scott allows some genuine strangeness through the door, the movie wakes up.

The critical response since release has reflected that peculiar split. The film currently sits on the distinctly soggy side of Rotten Tomatoes, with reviewers repeatedly praising the cinematography, Brolin and Scott’s action craftsmanship while wondering why such formidable talent has been employed on material that feels so familiar. A smaller group has been more forgiving, finding an appealingly melancholy and unexpectedly hopeful survival story underneath the conventional genre machinery.

Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we find ourselves somewhere between those camps. The Dog Stars is not a disaster. That would almost make it more interesting. Instead it is an extremely professionally constructed film containing flashes of a much better one. Scott can still direct action better than filmmakers half his age, Brolin is great company and there are moments of genuine beauty and oddness. Jasper is, obviously, splendid, although Hollywood has yet to discover a dog capable of giving a poor performance.

But there is surprisingly little sense that this particular apocalypse needed to exist on screen. Ridley Scott once showed us futures nobody else had imagined. Here he gives us a future we have visited rather too many times already.

Perhaps that is the final irony. The Dog Stars is about survivors desperately searching the ruins for something valuable that everybody else has overlooked. The film is doing much the same thing with the post-apocalyptic genre. There are still a few useful tins on the shelves. But somebody got to most of the good stuff first.