“Space… the Final Frontier.” It’s a provocative phrase, isn’t it? The Final Frontier, the last great mystery of exploration. In 1966, one of the most popular television genres was western adventure - Gunsmoke , Bonanza , Rawhide , episodic stories about life on this particular romanticized frontier were everywhere. What’s a competitive show to do but take it a step further? Where do you go once the west has been thoroughly demystified? How about a Wagon Train to the Stars? That was the phrase that one Gene Roddenberry used when pitching a series concept to Desilu Productions that would go on to be Star Trek , the basis of a sixty year television franchise (and occasionally film too ) , that would have one of the greatest out-sized impacts of a cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century. Desilu green-lit the idea (founder Lucille Ball specifically) and the rest is history. Three seasons that struggled in the ratings but gained an enormous fan following, a short-lived animated follow...
About twenty minutes into The Dog Stars , Jacob Elordi’s Hig loses his beloved German Shepherd Jasper. And the movie never recovers. It is called The Dog Stars , based on the book by Peter Heller, and whatever reasoning for that title there actually is (the film never reveals it), one would expect the dog introduced as chief companion to the protagonist would have some major part to play. But even posthumously, Jasper isn’t particularly significant to this apocalypse story about struggling to go on and find reason to live amidst societal collapse. I’m broadly an agnostic where dogs in movies are concerned, but this one is markedly dimmer once the dog exits the picture. Director Ridley Scott however tuckers on just like his lead, yet fails to make the point that character and those who matter to him are meant to. It’s the nearest Scott has come to making a zombie film, and it bears more than a little passing resemblance to 28 Years Later , in both its hordes of nebulously-infected dehu...