Staying Human After the Apocalypse: Critics Pick Apart Ridley Scott’s Film, Though ‘The Dog Stars’ Offers Rare Post-Apocalyptic Hope

Critics have been frowning on Ridley Scott’s latest film, but “The Dog Stars” is being defended as an unusually hopeful vision of life after the end of the world.

The film adapts Peter Heller’s lyrical apocalyptic novel. Scott has turned that intimate literary material into a large-scale production, a contrast that sits at the center of the criticism surrounding the movie.

Yet the film’s outlook is not simply one of ruin. The story is presented as an attempt to ask what it means to remain human after catastrophe, and as one of the most optimistic post-apocalyptic works of the recent period.

That tension gives the movie its particular appeal: a grand adaptation facing skeptical reviews, while still offering a more hopeful account of survival than the genre usually allows.