Ridley Scott’s ‘The Dog Stars’ Bombs With 37% on Rotten Tomatoes — A Beautiful, Boring Post-Apocalyptic Misfire

Ridley Scott is a filmmaker—actually, scratch that, an influencer whose medium happens to be cinema. Like any influencer, Scott has had his fair share of ups and downs. “Alien” and “Blade Runner” proved he was “ahead of the game,” while there have been many times when it felt like he was asleep at the wheel, operating his usual 10-camera system of filmmaking on autopilot.

That said, has Scott ever had a film get reviews as bad as “The Dog Stars” is currently getting? The embargo lifted, and this $100M+ post-apocalyptic film currently sits at 37% on Rotten Tomatoes. In 2026, when even the definition of a critic has become increasingly blurred—and, ironically enough, star-obsessed influencers can be critics too—a score in the 30s is becoming less and less common. “The Dog Stars” has achieved that.

Why is this movie, which was screened for most of the press yesterday, so bad? It doesn’t know what it wants to be. It falls awkwardly between a slow, introspective character drama and a post-apocalyptic action movie. The film is too slow and uneventful for an action thriller, but also not deep enough to justify its deliberate pace. It’s also just plain boring, with underdeveloped characters and a story that feels derivative rather than fresh. While watching “The Dog Stars,” I felt like I had seen this movie before, many times over, only done better.

The basic setup—a pilot named Hig (Jacob Elordi) trying to survive in a world devastated by a pandemic, living in isolation with his dog and a volatile neighbor—already sounded plodding to begin with. He spends his days flying his Cessna over the surrounding landscape, looking for signs of life and scavenging for supplies, while Bangley (Josh Brolin) keeps watch over their isolated compound, ready to shoot anyone who gets too close. There’s a potentially compelling dynamic there: Hig still wants to believe there’s something worth preserving, while Bangley seems to have accepted that civilization is over. But the screenplay, written by Mark L. Smith (“The Revenant”), never really digs into that relationship.

The plot gets more convoluted from there. Hig follows a mysterious radio signal to a military base, meets Cima (Margaret Qualley) and her father, and starts to see a life beyond survival. There are too many ideas being cooked up here, none of which really develop. Instead, the movie keeps bouncing around between grief, survivalism, romance and action without finding a satisfying balance between any of them.

Hey, at least the film looks much better than it plays. Erik Messerschmidt, known for his work on David Fincher’s last few movies, is clearly the real star here. The cinematography is stunning, those panoramic vistas especially—the view of the riverbed from Hig’s battered Cessna is an especially memorable image. Messerschmidt emphasizes the contrast between the open skies above and the decaying world below. There’s a real sense of scale.

Now, back to the bad stuff: Jacob Elordi’s performance is fairly one-note here — and that’s obviously a major issue since he’s supposed to lead the film. He spends most of it looking sad, staring into the distance and saying very little, but the performance rarely gives Hig much personality beyond grief. Allison Janney is also operating in a completely different movie. Her material and performance are so bizarrely out of step with the rest of the film that her scenes feel like they’ve been imported from some much campier post-apocalyptic satire. There’s a sequence involving her that pushes the movie into this almost cartoonish territory. I actually liked Josh Brolin and Margaret Qualley, but they have frustratingly little to work with.

It’s such a shame to have Scott, who turns 89 this year, waste his time on this strangely bland and overlong film, especially since, at his best, he has delivered ambitious and distinctive movies. The frustrating thing is that you can occasionally see the better film buried underneath this one. The locations are gorgeous, Messerschmidt’s cinematography is excellent, and there are flashes of a genuinely interesting character study about two men trying to decide whether survival is enough. But “The Dog Stars” never figures out what it wants to say about any of it. It’s no wonder 20th Century decided to dump the movie during the last week of August—a place where movies are set up to die quietly before the fall movie season begins.