Jacob Elordi’s Quiet Apocalypse: Ridley Scott’s ‘The Dog Stars’ Divides on Mood Over Mayhem

Ridley Scott has spent the last decade toggling between bombast and introspection, but with The Dog Stars he appears to have landed on something closer to the latter—filtered through the bleached-out despair of a post-pandemic Earth. Adapted from Peter Heller’s 2012 novel, the film stars Jacob Elordi as Hig, a pilot and survivor eking out existence in an abandoned airport hangar alongside a dog, a dying friend, and the faint memory of a world that once hummed with connection. Early reviews out of Venice suggest Scott has traded his signature spectacle for atmosphere so thick you can taste the dust.

Elordi’s restraint meets Scott’s restraint

The Hollywood Reporter’s first reactions frame the movie as a slow-burn character study that leans heavily on Elordi’s capacity for haunted stillness. Where the actor has lately been asked to smolder or strut, here he is required to listen to the wind and measure his own breathing. That gamble seems to have paid off for some; Deadline’s review calls the performance “internal without becoming inert,” crediting Elordi with selling a man who has outlived almost everything worth fighting for. Yet the same piece notes that Scott’s commitment to meditative pacing occasionally drifts into the self-indulgent, a charge that has trailed the director since at least The Counselor.

The film’s power sits less in what happens than in what has already been lost; Scott trusts the audience to feel the weight of that absence rather than spelling it out with another cathedral-sized set piece.

The Hollywood Reporter

Apocalypse now, but quieter

Both outlets highlight how The Dog Stars pointedly refuses the genre’s usual furniture. There are no roving cannibal gangs, no last-minute helicopter extractions, no swelling Hans Zimmer horns to tell us when to feel awe. Instead Scott lingers on the banal horror of routine: boiling water, checking fences, talking to a dog that cannot talk back. Deadline praises this minimalism as “bravely anti-cinematic,” while acknowledging it may test the patience of audiences reared on Mad Max sequels. The Hollywood Reporter is more bullish, arguing the film’s power sits less in what happens than in what has already been lost; Scott trusts the audience to feel the weight of that absence rather than spelling it out with another cathedral-sized set piece.

• Scott’s glacial pacing — a meditative virtue or self-indulgent drift
• Elordi’s haunted minimalism — internal depth or simply understated
• Practical, dust-choked world-building — atmospheric triumph or narrative drag

The money and the myth

At a reported $70 million, the production’s restraint feels almost like a marketing hook: see how the man who gave us Gladiator and Alien can now make grandeur out of silence. Whether that gamble works commercially is another question; Venice reactions alone cannot answer it. What they do suggest is a filmmaker less interested in comforting his audience than in mirroring their exhaustion. In 2026, after years of real-world plague, climate dread, and algorithmic numbness, a movie that simply sits with grief may feel either necessary or punishing—perhaps both.

The disagreement in the room, then, is not whether The Dog Stars is beautiful; almost everyone concedes the ravaged vistas and Elordi’s carved-from-granite face deliver that. The fight is whether beauty this austere still counts as entertainment, or whether Scott has finally made the art-house film his harshest critics always accused him of hiding inside the blockbuster machinery.