(Warning: mild spoilers ahead.)
There’s no crashed alien spaceship to mar the sweeping shots of the Colorado mountains … no replicants among the grubby survivors of the apocalypse … no historical costumes to dress up the battle scenes (but we do get Allison Janney in thirty pounds of Max Factor makeup and a crisp blue stewardess’s outfit).
Instead, The Dog Stars gives us a quiet story in which likable, attractive people make good and bad decisions in a post-plague world where the consequences of poor judgment are as harsh as they are swift.
Critics downvote the movie for bringing nothing new to the “surviving the end of the world” genre. And it’s true: the main character is haunted by all-too-familiar ghosts. The idea that confronting the survivors can be worse than the plague itself is nothing new. And, worst of all, a late-second-act expedition to the movie’s potential haven falls prey to complications we’ve seen too many times already on The Walking Dead.
And yet: Jacob Elordi and Margaret Qualley are enormously easy to look at, their characters are easy to like, and, if this were a weekly series on Apple TV, I’d be tuning in for weeks to come. Does that make for a successful summer “See It on IMAX!” movie? Maybe not.
The biggest accolade I can give The Dog Stars is this: Clyde stayed awake for the entire movie. This almost never happens; make of that what you will.
Here in our little corner of the world, I often wonder: if the worst happened—if COVID had been even more deadly, if some other plague thinned the herd enough to break down society, if the zombie apocalypse came and went—how would things play out in New Albany?
Would the best of us pull together, support each other, and build something sweet and rural and new? Or would roving gangs of thugs in camo pull up to the homes of vulnerable people, rifles in hand, demanding the food, water, and women?
At one point in my life, I was enough of an optimist to bet on our better natures. But after witnessing firsthand how small-town church people would tear into each other during, of all things, a congregational split, I’m thinking that by the time the zombies broke through our perimeter, they’d discover we’d already pitchforked each other to death.
The Dog Stars opened in theaters today, but I’m thinking you’ll enjoy it more in a couple of months, when you can stream it straight to your living room.
