Ridley Scott is showing few signs of slowing down. The Dog Stars is the seventh film he’s made to be released into cinemas since his 80th birthday (in 2017) and he’s started talking about making another Alien sequel recently when he finishes his next film, expected to be a new retelling of Treasure Island. The Dog Stars is set a few years after a flu pandemic has wiped out much of humanity – a man, his dog and his neighbour protecting their little patch of Colorado from the infected, until his urge to know what’s out there in the wider world gets the better of him.
The brief description of the film on various websites will tell you it’s a “post-apocalyptic action thriller” which may lead to certain expectations when it comes to the score; if you’ve ever read the wonderful book on which it’s based, you would realise those expectations were never likely to be anywhere near the mark.
Really the story is a very introspective character study about love and loss and ultimately hope, with the action sequences subservient to that, and that’s how you should set your musical expectations. I usually offer a parade of adjectives to describe the music I write about but this time think a single noun (and a proper noun, at that) will suffice: think Gustavo.
The composer is Harry Gregson-Williams, veteran of many collaborations with director Scott stretching back to 2005’s Kingdom of Heaven (one of his more acclaimed scores). And this score is absolutely nothing like that. For the most part played by a small ensemble, almost every cue led by solo guitar, on first impression it may come across as slight and so laid-back as to be almost horizontal (OK, the adjectives have arrived now) but really the composer is linking everything to the main character, Hig, played by Jacob Elordi – his underlying warmth, his sorrow at some of the things he’s forced to do and what he is in danger of becoming – even themes named for other characters (like “Bangley”, for Josh Brolin’s; and “Cima”, for Margaret Qualley’s) are really about Hig’s response to those characters more than any commentary on them themselves.
The former is one of several featuring the score’s most memorable recurring theme, always played by the guitar; the latter offers a somewhat different texture, female vocals bringing a feeling of genuine warmth. (Another cue with the vocal, “Meeting the Mennonites”, is so bucolically attractive I find it to be irresistible.)
A lot of the more action-oriented scenes are either unscored or are scored against the action – a couple of exceptions are “Roaches in Town” and the latter part of “Up in the Air”, where electronics come to the fore and produce a somewhat abrasive feel, but in reality this is more because it comes in such contrast to the very pleasant bulk of the music (i.e. because of what it isn’t, rather than what it is).
That comes to something of an abrupt end in “Bangley’s Last Stand”, which features all sorts of unusual vocal effects and sounds like it could easily come from a full-on horror score. It’s deeply unpleasant – again, it’s about Hig, his inner turmoil about what he’s witnessing. It continues into the following cue “They’ve Spotted You, Hig”, this time with guttural, almost feral-sounding percussive sounds joining.
That doesn’t last though, and the reality is that the majority of the 52-minute album is really very pleasant listening. It’s not a score that grabs your attention and it’s not going to win Gregson-Williams any awards, but it is the score the film needed and I think it’s a sharp and compelling piece of work that I’ve enjoyed exploring.
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