What is the new Ridley Scott, The Dog Stars worth?

A pilot, his dog and a world emptied by a pandemic. Scott returns to SF in an intimate rather than spectacular mode. Sublime at times, but overall a little short young man.

In 1982, Pauline Kael took four pages from the New Yorker to demolish Blade Runner. Its angle? Behind the prodigious sets, the film never thought about humans. Scott had the item framed and has displayed it in his office for thirty years. The Dog Stars could be (finally) the filmmaker’s response to the criticism. In any case, this is his first SF film where the setting is reduced to nothing. An almost disused hangar, an old Cessna, a line of mountains. Ten years after a disaster, Hig (Jacob Elordi) survives on this old airfield with his dog and Bangley (Josh Brolin), a former soldier who shoots on sight. One day, aboard his old Cessna, he hears a voice on the radio and decides to go see what it is…

On screen, the result is strange, paradoxical even on the part of Sir Ridley Scott. It’s a bit lazy, and like Hig in his Cessna, we often border on boredom… But what’s at stake goes beyond the success of the film. Scott does not give in to the classic postapo, he moves the cursors: if the genre has been fueled by shortage and predation since Mad Max, the trigger here is a voice captured on the radio, a promise and not a threat. Heller’s novel already had this strangeness: the end of the world paradoxically made the present more habitable.

Scott therefore follows this intuition and the filmmaker has never seemed so optimistic. Its simplicity is so deliberate that it even has a name in the credits. Dariusz Wolski, who has lit each of his films since Prometheus, gives way to Erik Messerschmidt, ops director of Mank and The Killer. Or the opposite of the Scott texture: no smoke, no monumental backlight, a light that describes instead of sculpting. Forty-four years later, the article can leave the wall. Good or bad, this time, there is only human.

By Ridley Scott. With Jacob Elordi, Margaret Qualley, Josh Brolin… Duration: 1h59. Released August 26