Popcorn Perspectives with Danny Minton
Week of August 24, 2026
The Dog Stars
Rated R for language and strong violence
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 38%
In Theaters
Based on the best-selling novel by Peter Heller, The Dog Stars takes place after a flu pandemic has wiped out most of the Earth’s population. A young man with an operable plane (Jacob Elordi) finds solace in taking his dog, Jasper, on various supply runs and scouting missions in the Denver area, only to come back home to his crotchety compound mate Bangley (Josh Brolin). But when he hears a voice on his radio coming from Grand Junction, Colorado, he dreams of escaping to see what else is out there. There’s a beauty to the first act of the film that is quite compelling. While danger presents itself, it’s the survival and loneliness that are most impactful. It’s really easy to like the two main characters and you quickly understand their relationship and its complexities. But when our hero leaves for Grand Junction, the film gets weird. And then it gets weirder. For the first half you see random bandits who try to infiltrate the camp. They call them “roaches” and they behave exactly in that matter. When they start to show up in numbers, they are less a tribe and more of a thoughtless hive mind bent on senseless violence and destruction. I thought this to be way too literal and a poor choice for the screenplay (and if it was in the book this way, then the source material was faulty). But then in the third act, things just take a turn for the surreal and this is where I really had to question if what we were seeing was actually happening or a dream. I’m all for odd twists and turns, but the third act just didn’t make sense to me at all. It was like a silly action film rather than a post-apocalyptic nightmare. I appreciated the injection of Guy Pearce and Margaret Qualley into the story. Their presence added much more legitimacy than you would expect, but their subplot and their actions seemed misaligned with the overall narrative. In the end, I’m not sure if this was a missed opportunity or just a book that didn’t need to be made into a movie. If director Ridley Scott can’t do it right, I’m not sure who could. This makes me think that the filmmakers had immense difficulty trying to visualize what they were reading on the page. C