Drive-in Saturday Tuesday Movie Review: The Dog Stars (2026)

The Drive-in Saturday Tuesday movie review is a seasonal feature in which I review movies I see at drive-in theaters. The name of the segment is taken from the Bowie song, though often the movies have no direct Bowie connection. Part of the fun is finding indirect Bowie connections, and a perhaps surprising number of these movies actually use a Bowie song in the soundtrack or are otherwise related to Bowie. But at the end of the day, this segment is a movie review!

Movie: The Dog Stars (2026)

Bowie Connection: The Dog Stars is a post-apocalyptic story set in a world similar to what Bowie was describing in “Diamond Dogs” (1974) and “Sunday” (2002). The more I think about it, “Diamond Dogs” should have been in this movie, somewhere. A Mick Jagger song managed to make it in, as well as a reference to Elvis. But Bowie was missing. More seriously, Bowie used the end of the world, or at least the collapse of civilization as a motif as early as “We Are Hungry Men” (1967). For Bowie, the collapse of the regular order of things was usually used as commentary on something else, sometimes different things at once. On an abstract level, the story here is about the collapse of its main character’s world. Hig (Jacob Elordi) lost his wife, child, and, later even his dog. Though the movie’s setting is dystopian and fantastical, the basic dilemma for Hig is whether to join his lost loved ones by killing himself, try to protect what little left he had and survive day to day, or build anew. Several of Bowie’s most apocalyptic songs hint, either in their lyrics or broader context, that the old needs to go in order to build up something better, but Bowie often leaves us hanging as to the outcome. Usually, all we get is that the world falls down.

Experience: We saw this movie at the supreme venue for a drive-in movie anywhere, Four Brothers in Amenia, NY. Four Brothers is less a drive-in theater than it is a complex. There’s a pizza restaurant and lobster shack on the premises. You can order from either menu, and there’s also a full-service ice cream stand, bar and live entertainment before the movie. There’s mini golf and a campsite. And then there are the two Airstreams for rent. That’s where we stayed, and we watched the movie from the porch, which is set up for this purpose. Amenia is about an hour and a half south of where we live, so if we’re gonna see a movie there, it is an overnight commitment. But part of my attraction to drive-ins is the experience, and there is no better experience than this. Not to be crude, but I was a pig in shit.

Movie Review: (Spoilers ahead) Well, I kinda spilled the beans as to what the movie is about already. I should say that my wife and I both liked the movie. But what we spent the ride back home the next day discussing were its political implications. Was it a right-wing movie or a left-wing movie? I should mention that this was the second feature of the night, the first being a 20th anniversary showing of the animated movie, Cars. I had never seen Cars and, actually, we were confused about what the first movie was going to be. In any case, that movie is set in a world in which sentient cars are the only inhabitants of the entire planet. Given that it was made 20 years ago, the filmmakers probably didn’t have the AI apocalypse in mind, but it was hard for me not to think of it. Anyway, I’m not gonna review Cars, at least not here. But I mention it because Ridley Scott, who directed The Dog Stars, cannot have been ignorant of the implications of this movie, given when he made it.

What I mean by that is this: despite being based on a book of the same name that was published in 2012, The Dog Stars movie was made following the real pandemic that disrupted life on Earth and resulted in the deaths of millions. The reason that the story is set in a post-apocalypse is that the apocalypse was a killer pandemic. I continue to be perplexed as to why art has largely avoided contemplating this enormous trauma we all experienced — though that can be said of society as a whole. Pretending that Covid didn’t happen, or that it didn’t do what it did, has itself become a political response. Anyway, to some extent, The Dog Stars asks the question, what would have happened if the pandemic had been even worse.

In the course of establishing the movie’s own premise, there’s a stray comment about vaccines, and a passing reference to a girl who recently died because of measles. This, too, was itself political commentary in the guise of a line of dialogue.

I should pause here—to me, it seems like a defining characteristic of the post-pandemic American right wing is to deny medicine, wish away recent history, except to recast it as a “deep state” conspiracy, oppose vaccinations, and certainly act like measles in particular cannot kill children. So, the very premise of The Dog Stars seems to challenge this worldview. Early into the movie, my wife turned to me and said, “MAGA won’t be happy with this.”

Maybe, but I’m not so sure. Now that the world has ended, Hig spends most of his time being a rugged individualist, flying around on a small airplane with his (doomed) dog, but living on a compound with a survivalist named Bangley (Josh Brolin). Bangley seems to actually enjoy the new world disorder. His life revolves around maintaining an arsenal and keeping watch with long-range weapons, which he uses to pick off any stray survivors—which he calls roaches—who happen upon his land. This, too, is how I perceive the MAGAs to see the world. The world is one of limited resources. Outsiders are suspect, and trespassers should be shot. Privately-owned weapons, not reliance on the creation of any sort of collective organization, like a government or even a big corporation, is the best way to survive. And survival is the goal, not making the world a better place. What’s mine is mine, this plot of land is mine, and don’t tread on me.

Meanwhile, Hig encounters and gains the trust of a surviving father and daughter, Pops (Guy Pearce) and Cima (Margaret Qualley). Reminiscent of the type of remote pioneer family unit that used to be common in westerns, the two represent another right-wing ideal. We have a father who protects his daughter (something that the right-wingers seem, again to me, to be obsessed with). That they live on their own plot of land shows a right-wing fantasy version of how the world should be ordered—people living in cabins in the woods, separated from one another and leaving their neighbors alone to the point of not knowing there’s a neighbor out there somewhere in the first place.

To add to the MAGA fantasy, there’s a shadowy invading force of tattooed, non-English speakers moving in from elsewhere. I might have misremembered that part, but the invaders eventually make their way both to Bangley as well as Pops and Cima. Their appearance was a cross between MS-13 and the bald guys wearing white makeup in Mad Max: Fury Road (one of several post-apocalyptic movies that this one draws inspiration from). These invaders are, unoriginally, called “Reapers” in passing at one point. Anyway, these Reapers are out for destruction, not survival. Instead of fleeing amidst gunfire, they keep coming, video-game style, and much of the combat we see is like that of a first-person shooter game, viewed through infrared night vision glasses. The video-game-like combat is reminiscent of how the current Trump administration puts out videos of alleged drug boats being blown up, Iranian targets being fired upon, and AI-generated warfare images that are much less realistic than those in this movie. The Reapers don’t speak English— they are verbal but unintelligible, and work as a collective, almost as if they possess a hive mind. This is not literally the case, but in contrast to the individualist protagonists, the Reapers seem to have a collective orientation toward destruction with its members having no obvious sense of individual identity, motivation or even survival instinct. And, of course, one well-armed good ol’ boy, Bangley, was able to single-handedly take out 50 Reapers. This is all MAGA fantasy.

For about half the movie, Hig is drawn to the grass-is-greener promise of a mysterious radio signal he occasionally picks up from a place called Grand Junction. The idea that there’s something better “out there” carries him, along with Pops and Cima, to that place, which turns out to be an airport repurposed as a fortified compound. The ruler of Grand Junction is a former stewardess named Darlene (Allison Janney), who still dresses as a stewardess. Anyway, as Admiral Ackbar would say, it’s a trap (of course). Darlene and her crew want to enslave Cima and (I think) eat Hig and Pops. But only after she’s able to give a monologue that sounds like what right-wingers think feminists sound like. Don’t worry, though, because she and her band get blown up by some handy grenades. The fantasy that there’s a better life “out there” or that outsiders can be trusted now having been dashed, the four protagonists reconvene and decide to relocate to a Mennonite colony that’s safe because it is so remote that it can only be seen from the air.

Thus, the movie ends in yet another right-wing fantasyland, an implicitly hierarchical religious colony where virtuous, mostly white (except for Benedict Wong) people do things like subsistence farming and childrearing.

So, despite the pandemic and the reference to measles and vaccines, The Dog Stars embraces a right-wing fever dream worldview. There’s even a subtle hint that the whole thing is like a country song (Hig, whose name is “Hig,” lost his job, his wife, his dog…).

Nonetheless, none of this offended me in the same way that, say Twisters (2024) did. I think that’s because, despite all the trappings, the movie’s central focus was on Hig’s character arc. Ridley Scott knows how to make a movie. There’s an extended sequence in which he gains the trust of Pops and Cima through a building project. The contrast between building and either destroying or just standing pat was a pretty clever way of advancing the story. Though the ending is happy and the Mennonite community seems like the nicest place we’ve encountered, the end is really the beginning of Hig’s new life. The point was not to show this guy triumphant, but rather to play out his process of figuring out what to do after he lost everything.

So, here’s one more way to see The Dog Stars, as anti-MAGA after all: Hig finds promise at the end in a conservative, but not MAGA community. There’s a difference. The post-pandemic world of violence can be thought of as analogous to our present moment. The Reapers are not invading migrants, but Trumpian chaos. Hig moves on with his life when he overcomes the temptations that led us, in our world, to our current predicament. Could be.

But more importantly, The Dog Stars is more about Hig than his world, and that made for a good story.

Rating: Three dog biscuits