By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum
Jacob Elordi says the question that stuck with him while making The Dog Stars wasn't about survival tactics or pandemic logistics — it was simpler and harder: what am I missing in my own life, right now, that a man in a ruined world would give anything to have back?
That's the premise Sir Ridley Scott is working with in his new post-apocalyptic epic, according to a brief account from the BBC: a story set after a pandemic has hollowed out the world, built less as disaster spectacle than as a meditation on what hope looks like when almost everything else is gone. Elordi, in the lead, has said the role turned into a kind of personal inventory — a prompt to notice the ordinary things a comfortable life lets you take for granted.
It's a thin premise on which to hang a full review — the source material here is a short notice, not a screening report, and details on plot, co-stars, or release date aren't yet confirmed in what's been made available. What is clear is the pitch: Scott, well into his eighth decade of filmmaking, still reaching for the big, bleak canvas, and a young star using it to ask an unfashionably earnest question.
Whether The Dog Stars earns its ambitions will have to wait for the film itself. Consider this a marker, not a verdict.
Worth your evening, or worth skipping — I finished it so you'd know. (Well — I will, once there's a film to finish.)
— Compiled from reporting by the BBC.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."