During the 2020 lockdown, I read a spate of pandemic- and isolation-themed novels. My favorite was Michael Crummey’s Sweetland, but I also enjoyed Peter Heller’s 2012 novel The Dog Stars, a moody, meandering, style-forward tale of a pilot and his dog stranded at the end of the world. Imagine my surprise, six years later, when the trailer for Ridley Scott’s film adaptation advertised a thrill-a-minute action flick starring the year’s biggest heartthrob. The jarring book-to-film transition felt like a Hollywood parable right out of The Player.
Then again, we know not to trust trailers, don’t we?
The deal
Hig (Jacob Elordi), a pilot and handyman, is one of the few survivors of a flu pandemic that decimated humanity. Having lost his wife, he lives on an abandoned Colorado airfield with his German shepherd, Jasper; and survivalist Bangley (Josh Brolin), who protects their compound with Marine-trained marksmanship. Lonely and restless, Hig makes supply runs in his vintage Cessna, trades with nearby Mennonites and monitors his radio for news of other survivors. The cynical Bangley, by contrast, views all outsiders as “roaches” to be exterminated.
After his beloved Jasper dies valiantly fighting off raiders (dog lovers, you’ve been warned), Hig sets off in search of the phantom voice (Allison Janney) he’s been hearing on the radio for years. Forced to crash land en route, he stumbles onto the property of a gun-toting rancher (Guy Pearce) and his daughter (Margaret Qualley). Will they crush him like a roach? Considering that Elordi and Qualley look like a celebrity couple, is that even a question?
Will you like it?
If the trailer for The Dog Stars feels dramatically at odds with its source material, that may be because the source material feels at odds with itself. The bulk of the novel is a slow burn, like a more hopeful version of The Road laced with Ernest Hemingway outdoorsy ruggedness. In the last third, however, Heller turns his storytelling up to a frantic 11: Hig just happens to meet a smart, gorgeous, very single woman in the middle of nowhere, and they head off into a rip-roaring action sequence. While the post-collapse scenario itself is far from fresh, one can easily imagine the property selling to Hollywood executives on the strength of these developments alone.
Scott and writers Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) and Christopher Wilkinson have cut down on the story’s less screen-friendly detours. Gone is a lengthy hike in the wilderness, for instance. To their credit, though, the filmmakers attempt to capture the book’s soul-searching tone as well as its harrowing survival action. Contrary to what the trailer suggests, the battles with bloodthirsty raiders are outnumbered by scenes of Hig doing chores, visiting his former home in Denver to moon over memories of his wife and contemplating airborne suicide via mountain. His conversations with Bangley still convey a major theme of the book: Can we afford hope or empathy after civilization falls, or must we focus on brute survival?
The novel’s characters are more iconic than individual, which may be why the quirky supporting performances prove more interesting here than the romantic leads. Brolin was born to play crusty misanthropes like Bangley, while Janney creates an indelibly odd impression with just a few minutes of screen time.
By contrast, Elordi appears to have trouble getting inside his role. He looks the part of a soulful, tinkering, dog-loving Marlboro Man, but we don’t feel Hig’s desolation, his love of nature or his ambivalence about survival. He just seems … bored. Perhaps the problem is casting a young actor as a character whose ruminations feel distinctly middle-aged, or perhaps Hig is a shaky construct that doesn’t work on-screen. Whatever the reason, the protagonist is a void at the center of the movie. Qualley brings a suspicious scrappiness to Hig’s love interest, Cima, but she can’t overcome her own character’s lack of shadings.
Hig and Cima appear to be destined for each other simply because they’re the only attractive, age-appropriate, non-murderous survivors within hundreds of miles. The nightmarish scenario becomes their meet-cute so the story can reaffirm the value of human connection. Everything else — including the various raiders and other, more outlandish threats — is just flashy window dressing to keep viewers from dozing off.
Perhaps The Dog Stars’ biggest problem is that we’ve already seen half a century of more memorable postapocalyptic cinema. (The clock starts in 1975 with the deeply deranged A Boy and His Dog, which shares the canine motif.) The movie isn’t aggressively bad in any way, but it fails to capitalize on the book’s best aspects and doubles down on its hackneyed ones, making it a watch fit mainly for the dog days.
If you like this, try…
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015; rentable): The cultish, murderous raiders shown in The Dog Stars feel cribbed from the more colorful War Boys in George Miller’s postapocalyptic action drama.
The Rover (2014; HBO Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Dog love is also involved in this post-collapse road-trip Western from Australia, in which Pearce plays a bitter loner and Robert Pattinson is the simple fellow he protects. If you like your apocalypses arty and meditative, it could be a better choice.
“Station Eleven” (one season, 2021-2022; HBO Max, YouTube Primetime): This adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s pandemic novel had the bad luck to be released during an actual pandemic surge. Now we can appreciate it as a beautifully made survival elegy that depicts a broader swath of humanity than The Dog Stars.
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Dog Stars”
This article appears in September 2 • 2026.
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