After reading The Dog Stars novel by Peter Heller, I was curious about the film, which came out this year. The movie took a critical bashing. It has a critic’s review score on Rotten Tomatoes of 41%.
First, let me say that I enjoyed the film. I thought that 41% was harsh. It deserved better than that. The film does have issues and the problem comes from the source material. The novel is a combination of deep personal reflection, and action scenes. The mix works well as a written story, but the change of tone from thoughtful rumination to ‘mindless action’ in a movie is always going to be challenging. This is usually when writers are forced to make a choice. Should they be faithful to the source material or change it? In this case they tried to be faithful to the novel, although somethings were changed to compress the timeline. It makes one think – what would this story have been like as a purely action movie or as a relationships movie? The problem with what we have is that the reflective moments make Hig look to weak to be in an action movie and the action scenes make him seem a bit ineffective as an action hero. The result is going to disappoint the audience.
The film looks great. The dystopian urban scenes, and the landscapes are all beautifully shot. There’s some overly expositional dialogue and noticeable amount of ‘F’ words that felt incongruous. The big problem is the way the different parts of the film take on a separate tone and don’t quite flow into one another. The flashbacks, Hig’s rumination, his relationship with Jasper the dog, his relationship with Cima, and his relationship with Bangely all feel disjointed. Maybe cutting some of them out would have provides extra time to dwell on the others? The different action locations felt like they’d come from different films. The Grand Junction airport scene felt more like something from 28 Years Later, or the underground bunker in A Boy and His Dog. The Reapers attack was like something from a mashup of a cowboy movie meets Mad Max.
In spite of these issues, I did enjoy watching it. Dare I say it, but could a voiceover have helped mesh things together?