"The Dog Stars" is making news this week, and for the wrong reasons. Director Ridley Scott has made some of the best movies in cinema history, and with some incredible actors. While he nailed the latter part again with this post-apocalyptic drama — it stars Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Guy Pearce, Margaret Qualley and features an incredible third-act appearance from Allison Janney — it seems unlikely that this will go down as one of the best movies.
Right now, "The Dog Stars" is a meager 40% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. You don't have to be a film critic to know that's bad. But I am a film critic. And I've seen the movie. And I'm here to tell you that not only do I think that 40% rating is harsh, but it's actually misleading.
Is 'The Dog Stars' really rotten?
Before we dive into why you should see "The Dog Stars" — which, for the record, you should — let's examine that 40% fresh rating. Because I took a look at the critics' reviews, and there are some reviews that are arguably merely a bruised tomato than a rotten one.
For those of you who don't know how Rotten Tomatoes works, there are actually four different scores on the site for any given movie. There are the famous Tomatometer and Popcornmeter ratings from critics and audiences, respectively. These are merely pass/fail ratings on whether you should see a movie. Then, there are the scored reviews: For audiences, these are always out of five stars, but for critics, they're out of four stars, five stars, or on an A+ to F letter-grade scale.
This means that sometimes, a review you might reasonably think is a "pass," and therefore should be rated fresh, is instead rated as a rotten review.
Now, this too gets subjective. When I rate something a 2.5 out of 5, that means it was a fine movie with some good moments, but it wasn't quite a good movie. However, 2.5 out of 5 is also arguably a failing grade. If you got it on a school test, it'd be 50%, or the equivalent of an F. When you go to an individual critic's review on their site, they have the chance to explain these nuances, but on Rotten Tomatoes, you aren't given any such clarification.
For "The Dog Stars," there are several 2.5 out of 5 ratings dubbed "rotten." There are also several 2.5-out-of-4-star rotten reviews, which I'd argue should be a fresh review instead. There are also several rotten reviews without any score attached at all.
To be clear, this is a flawed movie, and I'll get into that momentarily. But when you see that 40% fresh rating, just know there are all these levels of nuance to that number that don't get explained. You should dive deeper into the reviews to see what the critics are really saying.
This movie has great moments worth seeing on the biggest screen, despite its flaws
OK, now that I've vented about the myriad flaws of Rotten Tomatoes, let's dive into whether or not this movie is actually good. Spoiler alert: It is, though it also has myriad flaws. Our senior streaming writer, Alix Blackburn, highlighted some of these flaws in her "The Dog Stars" review, which I highly recommend reading once you've finished this article.
Let's start with the good stuff. This movie is well shot. It looks gorgeous. Granted, it's tough to make the Colorado wilderness look bad, especially when it's really the northern Italian mountains.
There are also some awesome action set pieces, and, for me, these ended up being the real draw of the movie. The highlight of these is when a band of marauders invades the airstrip that Hig (Elordi) and Bangley (Brolin) call home, and Bangley starts gleefully hunting them down. We see a lot of this through his night-vision goggles, a choice that worked for me.
There's also another band of marauders that chase an escaping Hig, Cima (Qualley) and "Pops" (Pearce), that feels like it could be out of a "Mad Max" movie if it wasn't for the lush, verdant landscape.
Without getting into spoilers, I also loved Allison Janney's performance. It comes out of nowhere, and I could see some people finding it tonally jarring. But I loved it.
Now, for the bad. The story of "The Dog Stars" is thin. It's clichéd. The interpersonal relationship archetypes and character development are similarly clichéd. Some of the actors manage to elevate their characters to varying degrees. Margaret Qualley, sadly, is not one of them. I found myself wondering who else could have played her role, and I was struggling to think of actresses who couldn't.
Ultimately, these flaws didn't bother me as much as they clearly bothered others. I think between the source material and the trailer, people were expecting an epic post-apocalyptic blockbuster with some spark.
Admittedly, that's not what "The Dog Stars" is. It's basically a chapter in these characters' lives; a tale of a man going to a place, then coming back and realizing he was home all along. At times, it feels like it's cosplaying as "The Last of Us." But I still managed to be entertained by the filmmaking spectacle on an IMAX screen that Ridley Scott provided over the course of 118 minutes.
So if you're thinking about going to see it this weekend, I think you should. Just manage your expectations appropriately and enjoy the ride.
See "The Dog Stars" in theaters now
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