We review ‘The Dog Constellation’, the new film by Ridley Scott

Despite being directed by the author of science fiction classics such as “Alien” either “Blade Runner”, “The constellation of the dog” – “The Dog Stars” in its original version, an adaptation of Peter Heller’s best seller – we are not facing an ordinary genre film; something that would not have to be negative, but which is not completely satisfactory here either.

Whoever is attracted by the premise – in a post-apocalyptic society devastated by a virus and marked by the fight for survival, the protagonist embarks on a journey after receiving signs of life over the radio – should know that they will not find action and tension until the second part. Until then, it is as if the octogenarian Scott – he turns eighty-nine in November – preferred, from his life experience, to reflect on the ways of being in the world, especially when it has become half extinct (or, what amounts to the same thing, when there are war conflicts in various parts of the globe).

Scott articulates the message through the contrast between a couple of survivors: Josh Brolin, a trigger-happy nihilist, and Jacob Elordi, a melancholic eager for hope. On his solo trip, Elordi will find another couple in a similar mold; this time, a father – Guy Pearce, with a physique similar to Brolin – and a daughter with a more open outlook than her father, Margaret Qualley. In this generational opposition, Scott is betting on young people, eager to build something new. In this regenerative vision, Scott prints a suggestive air of neo-Western, although he does not always apply it in a fortunate way, especially when he resorts to the cowboys versus Apaches aesthetic in a confrontation between the protagonists against savage invaders.

Once the thought of the film was presented, Ridley Scott He decides, finally and based on the cynical presence of Allison Janney, to thin the atmosphere and remind us, even if without reaching the milestones of the past, the great creator of atmospheres that he was. This is when the film grows in intensity.