Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin [20th Century Studios]

THE DOG STARS
Directed by Ridley Scott
Certificate: 15
☆☆

FOR a film that is just a cliché-riddled load of dystopian baloney, Ridley Scott’s latest offering trundles along its predictable tracks with pace, verve and enough cheek to mean it isn’t a complete disaster.

Perhaps it is because outside the cinema auditoriums, we are watching the end of the USA as a global empire, so a fictionalised take on a civilisation crumbling subconsciously talks to us.

This end-of-days film does not say America has fallen because of Trump, though his advice during the Covid pandemic might well have been disastrous if listened to. Instead, Scott has created a world taken apart by a global flu.

We meet survivor Hig (Jacob Elordi) a hunky mechanic with a broken heart, living out his days in a remote valley with buddy Bangley (Josh Brolin).

Each day he takes off in his little airplane to fly to Denver to gather supplies. We follow his adventures as he grieves his lost wife, finds new love with good ol’ country girl Cima (Margaret Qualley), and flies in like Father Christmas to deliver fizzy drinks to a Christian community.

In the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, we smelt what a dystopian future looks like. It was a world of unkempt beards, straggly hair and rotten teeth. Here, it is a trendy, blue collar construction aesthetic: the end of the world is a Carhartt clothing advert.

The goodies encounter two marauding gangs through the yarn, and both seem to have lost the ability to communicate in anything but snorts and whoops, and have seemingly switched their focus from survival to creating a gang-look based on a mash-up of Mad Max and Once Were Warriors. Why they roam around half naked, tattooed and war-painted up makes no sense. But then again, nothing really does in this odd, disjointed, and pointless zombie / pandemic whirlpool of clichés.

When Hig hears over his plane’s radio a call from a place called Grand Junction, he just has to go and check it out… Without wanting to spoil the “plot”, the Grand Junction sequence is a bizarre aside, an LSD-infused set of scenes of no consequence.

Scott has made a survivalist Western, drawing on a de-populated West, as if the USA has gone back to the pioneer days. Gangs on horseback with bows and arrows are obvious references, as are the gentle townsfolk, holed up in a remote valley, living simply and with the fear of a Christian God in their hearts.

Silly, but watchable.