A wave of what is known uninspiringly as “hopecore” is sweeping through theatres. At surface level these films inspire hope, turning often apocalyptic worlds on their head – Project Hail Mary, Mickey 17, Disclosure Day, to name a few. If you dig a little deeper, you usually only find some half-baked ideas about how being nice to one another would solve all the world’s ills. This week, it’s Ridley Scott’s turn to add to this growing vibe shift with The Dog Stars. The year is 2035 and a virus has wiped out most of humanity, leaving only a few gruff countrymen – (Josh Brolin as Bangley and Guy Pearce as Pops) – and two of the most gorgeous people on earth (Jacob Elordi as Hig and Margaret Qualley as Cima).
Since Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi has successfully broken free from his typecasting as the heartbreaker, but now he seems to have found himself in a new box. Like the Creature in Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff, Hig is one of the world’s underdogs. A mechanic of simple means, who before the virus spent his free time “kissing my wife and playing with my dog” – yes this is a legitimate line from the film. Now Hig flies his banged up Cessna with his faithful dog Jasper, searching the abandoned city of Denver for supplies, visiting the hillside mennonite community and returning to drink whiskey and gamble with his survival partner Bangley. But when Jasper is killed by roaming scavengers, Hig has nothing keeping him with the ranting paranoid prepper Bangley, and goes in search of another life or a dramatic death.
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Scott’s latest movie is an often saccharine blend of values, lamenting the now extinct vaccine, the need for human connection and an urge to value the small things that make up the good life (a starry sky, an iPod classic, pancakes with marshmallow sprinkles). But there are also some incredibly dark scenes where danger comes mainly in the form of large groups of other humans. Unlike the beautiful, weatherbeaten hard-working individuals like Hig, Bangley, Cima and Pops, their attacks are often monosyllabic hordes, either heavily tattooed and bareskinned or covered in some sort of tribal warpaint, bringing screaming chaos and unnecessary violence wherever they go. Although Bangley’s insular nature is a contentious point between him and Hig, it seems understandable when very few survivors have kept their humanity. But Scott wants to remind us there are those that will, you might just have to risk your life a few times to find them.
All of this might have been a lot easier to make sense of if it weren’t for the very constant and distracting product placement, including a box of Sprite (the mennonite children’s favourite vice), Coca Cola bottles (Bangley’s drug of choice), Bulleit Bourbon for male bonding time between Hig and Pops and most bizarrely a copy of David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’ sitting between a box of grenades and an aviation kit. Alongside the hokey spirituality (a donkey leading Hig to Cima and his belief that his dog’s spirit is looking down on him from the stars), The Dog Stars really is just a jumble of sentimentality and nostalgia for Americana with a few intense action sequences. All I can make out from Scott’s latest is that we need to enjoy what we have while we have it – mainly Coca Cola, whiskey and streaming music – and search for your people when the hard times come. I guess that’s all you can expect from a movie that insists on beginning and ending with the same Hozier track.