Iconic director Ridley Scott is returning to the cinemas this weekend with his new post-apocalyptic horror thriller, The Dog Stars, starring Jacob Elordi, Margaret Qualley, and Josh Brolin. The film is based on the 2012 novel of the same name by author Peter Heller and is a project that Scott has been noticeably amped up about for some time. Just a few months ago, Scott was publicly touting that The Dog Stars was “probably the best movie I’ve done since The Martian.”
While that quote was, admittedly, an already odd thing to say, given that Scott has made a host of great movies in the decade-plus since the release of The Martian, it would appear that the critical consensus for the film is far from in agreement with Scott’s own. In fact, The Dog Stars has netted the director his worst reviews in over a decade.
As a quick disclaimer, we’re going to be talking about reviews in broad strokes here and using sites like Rotten Tomatoes as shorthand. It’s critical to note that a site like Rotten Tomatoes is an aggregator, in which a given critic’s review is not actually considered in full, but rather filtered through a didactic system in which it must either be deemed ‘positive’ or ‘negative.’ So when you see a film has a given percentage on Rotten Tomatoes, it doesn’t mean that that’s the average score that all critics have given the movie but rather a percentage of positive versus negative reviews of the film. Thus, in this situation, speaking about The Dog Stars having a current percentage of 39% on the site means that 61% of the critics who have submitted reviews to the site have given Scott’s new film a negative review.
This is notably low for the acclaimed and prolific director. While more recent films, such as All the Money in the World, House of Gucci, or even Napoleon, were not met with glowing reception upon release, none of them received this amount of negative reviews. The reception of those films was much more mixed, with strong proponents on both sides. For The Dog Stars, however, it seems that even those giving the film positive reviews aren’t exactly jumping up and down about its quality. The last time a Ridley Scott-directed film received this kind of critical beating was in 2013 and 2014, when the back-to-back releases of The Counselor and Exodus: Gods and Kings earned him a great deal of ire. Notably, both of those films got even worse reviews than The Dog Stars.
The marketing for The Dog Stars never quite got my blood racing, so this isn’t a huge surprise, but I will simply say that anyone dogpiling on Scott for the film’s quality should rethink their life. Ridley Scott is a literal living legend, and anyone who says anything remotely akin to ‘he just doesn’t have it anymore’ is just demonstrating their own ignorance, because The Last Duel remains one of the single greatest films in his whole filmography, and that was made just a few years ago.
Regardless of any of this, I’ll still be there opening night for his next film, which is hopefully that Alien: Covenant sequel.
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