Time for another fun game of “What the hell happened here?”

Director Ridley Scott needs no introduction. Mark L. Smith is a respectable journeyman screenwriter (The Revenant, Overlord, The Boys in the Boat, Twisters, etc.). Josh Brolin, Allison Janney, Benedict Wong, and Guy Pearce are all consistently reliable talents, and we’ve got Jacob Elordi and Margaret Qualley at the peak of their respective star powers. Yet the reviews for The Dog Stars have been middling at best, and the film is getting thrashed at the box office in the wake of Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Coyote vs. Acme. (Both phenomenal movies well-deserving of their respective successes, I might add.)

So, with all this talent behind it, what went wrong with The Dog Stars? Does it deserve better? Well, let’s take a look.

We lay our scene in 2035, some unspecified amount of time after a worldwide flu pandemic wiped out pretty much the entire human race. (At a ballpark guess, based on some kids we meet who were born sometime after the plagues started, I’d guess somewhere around eight years.) All that’s left are a few pockets of surviving humans, except for a few roving hordes large enough and healthy enough that it couldn’t possibly be feasible without a zombie plague. Whomever’s left spends most of their time scavenging any leftover resources. Though resources are strangely plentiful when the plot demands it.

Elordi plays Hig (no, we never get an explanation for the name), a mechanic who regularly flies an antique Cessna to raid whatever’s left of Denver. Bangley (Brolin) is his partner, a Marine sniper and survivalist nutjob who built and maintains the remote airfield where Hig and Bangley make their home. Bangley is the cynical asshole who’s only out to survive for survival’s sake, while Hig is too restless to convince himself that a better world is impossible.

And then (CONTENT WARNING!) Hig’s dog dies. Yeah, Hig’s other partner is Jasper, a German shepherd Hig raised up from a puppy since before the plagues. The first act thoroughly establishes Jasper as the bestest boy ever, right up until he’s killed and buried onscreen at the close of the first act.

So now Hig’s distraught over losing his dog, at a time when he still hasn’t gotten over the loss of his wife (Melissa, played in flashbacks by Sai Bennett) and unborn child. Thus Hig takes his Cessna and sets out looking for the mythical Grand Junction Airport, which may still be operational. Predictably, things go wrong.

Before I go any further, I want to state clearly that the visuals kick ass. The aerial photography is gorgeous from start to finish. The editing is tight. This whole movie takes place in a post-human world reclaimed by nature, and the atmosphere is immaculate.

But then there’s the script.

It’s a blessing that the cast is so powerful, because the characters are pathetically flat. Elordi plays a superman who’s preternaturally perfect at everything and he’s always right about every argument and his plot armor is impervious. His only real problem is grief over his dead wife and dog. It’s not enough. Elordi’s perpetual smolder is pretty much the only thing keeping this protagonist watchable.

Likewise, Qualley’s character has virtually no function or personality aside from serving as Hig’s love interest. If it wasn’t for Qualley’s innate charm, the character would have nothing. Brolin and Pearce are basically playing duplicates of the same character. Janney plays a transparent villain for a few minutes, but at least she gets to ham it up for a while in the process. Benedict Wong is there, but he might as well not be.

The pacing is janky as hell, likely because there’s only about an hour of plot in this two-hour movie. And what plot we get is woefully predictable and derivative. If you’ve seen 28 Days Later, you’ve already seen a far more compelling rendition of this exact same plot. I need hardly add that between the vaguely defined apocalypse, the resource stockpiles that are somehow still around and untouched after however many years, and the hordes of not-zombies that shouldn’t exist based on what we know about this setting, the world-building on display here is pitiful.

Yes, I will readily grant that The Dog Stars does a decent job making statements about community, self-reliance, compassion, and other standard post-apocalyptic themes explored in far better post-apocalyptic stories. In fact, that’s really what it comes down to with this whole movie: It’s the standard and nothing more. Nothing memorable, nothing unique, nothing going on under the gorgeous exterior.

This is one of those unfortunate cases in which the film had everything it needed except a script. I’m not sure if the problem was with Smith or with the original Peter Heller novel, but somebody needed to go back and polish the world-building, punch up the characters, and trim at least fifteen minutes from the runtime. I need hardly add that after “The Walking Dead”, four 28 Days Later movies, and the oversaturation of post-apocalyptic fiction that we’ve seen since 9/11, it’ll take a lot more than this to make any kind of impression.

It’s not a bad film, but something even worse: It’s boring. I feel genuinely sorry for all the wonderful talents who couldn’t make this into something worthy of their involvement. Not recommended.