When a new movie comes out from Sir Ridley Scott, I pay attention. Now, I think a lot of cinephiles can agree he’s had a good mix of hits and misses, but it’s still hard to say no to the man who made favorites like Alien, Blade Runner and The Martian. His latest is a film called The Dog Stars, which is one of the latest book-to-screen adaptations to hit the 2026 movie schedule.
I hadn’t read the book and wasn’t entirely sure what to expect aside from what I saw from the trailer, but I gave it a shot, and there’s a twist in it that had me going “Wait, what?” SPOILERS are ahead!
The Dog Stars’ Twist Really Threw Me Off
The Dog Stars follows Jacob Elordi’s Hig, one of the few survivors of a flu pandemic who is living in Colorado with Josh Brolin’s trigger-happy Bangley. The story really kicks off when his best friend, a dog named Jasper, dies, and he decides to fly his small plane into the unknown. Specifically, he’s aiming for the state’s city of Grand Junction. Most of the story focuses on an unexpected pit stop where he meets a young woman named Cima (Margaret Qualley) and her father (Guy Pearce). When their ranch gets attacked, the three of them head to Grand Junction.
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What do they find at Grand Junction? A horror movie! After a quiet, introspective film full of folksy songs from the likes of Hozier and leaning into the romance territory, it just didn’t seem to fit at all! Suddenly I’m watching Allison Janney play a former stewardess in full vintage stewardess attire serving them drinks and acting really creepy.
She tries to marry off Cima to one of her soldiers without her permission and is really intense and weird. Hig uses a cigarette to get the scene burning so they can run off, where they find bags of bodies that have been cut up, and rows of polaroids of past victims on the walls. They jet off from Grand Junction, but I couldn’t help but feel like the movie took me in a completely different direction than the rest of it.
But, Honestly… My Confusion Didn’t Stop There
The twist in The Dog Stars speaks to me about a larger issue with the film, and probably why it’s getting a lot of poor reviews from critics. To me, it had a real tonal issue that was constantly giving me whiplash between the sci-fi, action and the more dramatic elements of the film. I thought there would be some cool science-fiction dystopia concept that would interest me, but it ended up really staying on the surface level, and being rather boring for most of it, too.
I mean, there are these massive groups of tattooed armies that kept trying to get the main characters, but I had no inkling about who they were exactly and why they acted so oddly. There’s one big action scene where they are relentlessly running after Hig, Cima and her father, but I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Why?”
There was never an explanation for why all the other characters in the movie were so violent or horrible, except, I guess at the end of the world people are more animalistic? Did I miss something? I’m disappointed by The Dog Stars, but more than anything, it just made me feel confused about the whole thing.