The Dog Stars: what to expect from Ridley Scott's new sci-fi

Ridley Scott is 88 and still choosing projects nobody else would have the nerve to make. After Napoleon (2023) and Gladiator II (2024), he's returning to the territory that made him famous: epic-scope science fiction with a human character at its centre. The Dog Stars opens on 28 August and the final trailer dropped three days ago. What the trailer shows is not what you'd expect from a post-apocalyptic film.

What The Dog Stars is

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Peter Heller, published in 2012, named iTunes Book of the Year and a New York Times bestseller. The premise: a flu pandemic has wiped out most of humanity. Nine years later, Hig (Jacob Elordi) survives in an abandoned airport hangar in Erie, Colorado, alongside his dog and Bangley (Josh Brolin), a former Marine who traded humanity for pure efficiency. Together they patrol a five-mile perimeter. Bangley handles security; Hig keeps a Cessna flying and preserves what's left of his capacity to feel anything at all.

The turning point comes when, during a reconnaissance flight, Hig picks up a radio transmission of unknown origin. The signal might be nothing — or it might be proof that something survived beyond that airport.

Why Ridley Scott wanted to adapt this book

Scott told Empire, in an interview given before the final trailer, that he doesn't want to repeat the zombie cliché: the proposal is a post-apocalypse without a cartoonish antagonist, without a horde, without a villain with an agenda. The film's Reapers — hostile groups of survivors who threaten the perimeter — exist and are a real danger, but they aren't the subject. The subject is Hig's interior life: the loss of his wife, the strange friendship with Bangley, the almost irrational impulse to believe there's something beyond five miles of concrete and scrub.

Heller's literary style is sparse, and critics compare it to Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood. Scott, who spent decades building dense visual worlds, seems to have chosen the project for the contrast: a destroyed world that tells its story through subtraction, not through an accumulation of catastrophe.

The cast and what each brings

Casting Jacob Elordi as Hig raised eyebrows when it was announced. The actor, known for Euphoria and Saltburn, wasn't the obvious profile for a survival-drama lead — but he's exactly the right choice for the part. The Hig of the novel isn't a soldier and isn't a survival expert. He's a civilian pilot who got lucky. The vulnerability Elordi brings on screen is an asset, not a problem.

Josh Brolin as Bangley is the opposite anchor: ex-military, dry, incapable of sentimentality. The two form the same kind of contrast McCarthy set up between father and son in The Road — only horizontal, between two adults with irreconcilable worldviews who still depend on each other to survive.

Margaret Qualley and Guy Pearce round out the second act as a father and daughter living in isolation who represent the only concrete possibility of rebuilding. Allison Janney and Benedict Wong appear in roles the studio hasn't fully revealed.

Does Jacob Elordi work as a survival-drama lead?

Judging by the trailers, yes. The performance visible in the released footage shows Elordi in a more restrained register than in Saltburn — less volatile, more exhausted. The actor has understood that Hig doesn't react with explosions, he reacts with accumulated weight. It's an acting choice that will either carry the whole film or collapse in the second act. August will answer that.

What sets The Dog Stars apart from Hollywood's standard apocalypse

Big-budget post-apocalyptic blockbusters tend to follow a predictable arc: the protagonist organises a group, faces an antagonist with a clear agenda, society starts rebuilding at the end. The Dog Stars doesn't have that clean structure. The radio transmission Hig picks up may lead nowhere — and the novel keeps that ambiguity to the end.

Ridley Scott, who debuted in the genre with Alien (1979) and cemented his identity with Blade Runner (1982) — two films where the threat is never fully defeated, only dodged — is on familiar ground. His science fiction has always been about what humans do when the structure that defines them disappears. The Dog Stars is the most direct version of that theme: no alien corporation, no urban dystopia, just two men, an airport and five miles of danger.

If you want to calibrate your expectations, Spielberg's Disclosure Day is the immediate counterpoint released this year: where Scott bets on silence and restraint, Spielberg bet on wonder and revelation. The two are the best that big-budget science fiction produced in 2026 — with opposite approaches.

Adapting McCarthy, Heller and the challenge of the subjective camera

The main risk with The Dog Stars is technical. Heller's novel is written in an almost stream-of-consciousness register — sparse, subjective, without conventional chapters. It's the kind of prose that either converts into a magnetic screen performance or turns oddly cold when externalised into dialogue and action.

The adaptation of The Road (2009), directed by John Hillcoat, solved the problem by prioritising a single relationship — the father and the son — above everything else. Scott will probably prioritise the relationship between Hig and Bangley, and use the ruined Colorado as visual language. The trailer bets on exactly that: every shot of the Cessna flying over abandoned fields says more about Hig's emotional state than any line of dialogue.

To understand where the tradition of sci-fi that trusts character over spectacle comes from, the post on Metropolis from 1927 and the robots it invented gives the full context — that's where this kind of aesthetic choice began in cinema. And if you want the direct contrast, The Day After Tomorrow, 22 years on, is the apocalypse Scott is deliberately avoiding: spectacle first, character second.

The full listing for The Dog Stars will be up at Rei dos Filmes when the film opens — cast, synopsis and rating. Out on 28 August.