Critics roast Jacob Elordi’s new post-apocalyptic film The Dog Stars
Source: 20th Century Studios
Australian actor Jacob Elordi has been riding a career wave in recent years, earning plaudits and award nods for roles ranging from Frankenstein’s monster to the haunted Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
The 29-year-old Euphoria star has even been touted as a frontrunner to play the next James Bond – but his latest film has critics shaken and stirred in all the wrong ways.
The Dog Stars, opening in Australian cinemas this week, is based on a bestselling book and helmed by Hollywood heavyweight Ridley Scott, the now 88-year-old director behind such epics as Alien, Gladiator and Blade Runner.
Elordi leads a cast that includes two other Academy Award nominees – fellow Aussie Guy Pearce and Josh Brolin – alongside Oscar winner Alison Janney and rising star Margaret Qualley.
Yet while the dystopian drama appears to have all the ingredients of a blockbuster, including a $US110 million ($A153 million) production budget, the early verdict has been brutal.
With close to 100 reviews in, The Dog Stars’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes was just 38 per cent, putting it among the lowest-scoring features on the movie review website.
A “post-apocalyptic bore” is how The Independent headlined its two-star review, while The Guardian described the film as “limp and lethargic” and IndieWire said it was “bizarrely inert”.
“It probably takes more effort to make a boring post-apocalyptic survivalist action film than to make a good one. If that’s the case, then Ridley Scott must’ve been working overtime on The Dog Stars,” wrote the critic on American film review website RogerEbert.com.
“This wasteland narrative is the most tedious film of Scott’s career.”
Adapted from American author Pete Heller’s 2012 science-fiction bestseller of the same name, The Dog Stars – variously described as a neo or pseudo western – is set in a dystopian future where a flu pandemic has killed most humans.
Elordi plays one of the remaining survivors, a widowed pilot named Hig who lives in a remote airfield in Colorado with his dog Jasper and gun-toting ex-marine Bangley (Bolin). Venturing beyond the hangar, Hig encounters father and daughter Jack and Cima (Pearce and Qualley), but also faces a threat posed by roaming scavengers who are ominously called Reapers.
Many of the criticisms levelled at the film accuse it of being derivative, clunky and unfocussed.
Elordi’s performance has been better received – The Hollywood Reporter even said the Australian has an “introspective movie-star magnetism that evokes the heyday of Kevin Costner” – but not by all reviewers.
In The Guardian, Benjamin Lee wrote that the actor seemed “as fatigued by playing Hig as we are at watching him”.
“It’s a boringly absent lead performance of empty, stoic stares, although with a puddle-deep script that asks very little and gives even less as reward, there’s not much more anyone could have done …”
The early reviews are unlikely to help The Dog Stars opening-weekend box-office result, but a roasting from critics doesn’t necessarily deter movie fans.
British director Emerald Fennell’s steamy take on Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights – in which Elordi and fellow Australian Margot Robbie played ill-fated lovers Heathcliff and Cathy – proved hugely divisive, with one of the harshest critiques desribing it as “astonishingly hollow”.
The film then went on to rake in more than $241 million ($A355 million) worldwide.
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