Despite the title, the dog does not really star. It is really more of a small supporting role.

Sir Ridley Scott, the legendary director behind Alien, Blade Runner, and Thelma & Louise, will be 89 years old before the year is out. He has built a well-earned reputation for visually stunning aesthetics in his films – largely due to his career origins in design and advertising – and I tend to approach any new feature with plenty of goodwill. Over the decades I feel that trust in Scott’s talent has been well rewarded, finding enormous worth in both his commercial hits and his less successful works. Even in his most egregious works – and it feels churlish to keep bringing up Prometheus (2012) like some reputational millstone around his neck – there is at least interesting elements among the chaff. He is my favourite kind of director: outstanding when he is good, and at least fascinating when he is not. It is rare that Scott releases an actively boring film, but here we are.

The Dog Stars, which opens worldwide this week, adapts the 2012 Peter Heller novel. In the aftermath of a global pandemic, a survivor named Hig (Jacob Elordi) ekes out a bleak existence in a Colorado compound with the gruff survivalist Bangley (Josh Brolin). Hearing an intermittent radio signal, that may be a larger community, Hig sets out with his Cessna light airplane to seek its source.

To an extent, if you have seen one post-apocalyptic drama you have seen them all. The Dog Stars is, for the most part, hopelessly generic and grindingly predictable. Its characters play out as overly familiar stereotypes, while each story beat is easily forecast in advance by any viewer with at least a passing familiarity with the genre. What is worse, Scott retells this familiar sequence of events with a glacial pace. The Dog Stars runs a shade under two hours; it honestly feels like three-and-a-half.

It is not simply the plot and characters that feel recycled: the oversights and inaccuracies of the average post-apocalyptic work are brought back as well. While the film keeps its timeline quite vague, Heller’s novel specifies a nine-year gap between the end of civilization and the events of The Dog Stars. That’s a long time. Food spoils. Buildings collapse. Aviation fuel, which Hig consumes an awful lot during his search, expires within 6-12 months if not maintained or treated.

Like many films of its genre, The Dog Stars very quickly settles into playing an awful lot of western tropes; so many, in fact, that one wishes Scott had directed an honest-to-God western instead. Just like so many science fiction westerns, the film once again swaps in cult-like violent gangs of savage killers where old Hollywood would have presented hordes of Native Americans. No one ever seems to question the optics of that.

Perhaps it is the fact that we are presently all living through the slow collapse of civilization due to runaway climate change, but simplistic by-the-numbers presentations of the end of the world are not working for me any more.

Jacob Elordi seems a solid lead, although Mark L Smith’s screenplay does not afford him all three dimensions with which to work. The same is true of Margaret Qualley as Cima, the film’s sole significant female character. Josh Brolin continues his trajectory towards playing all of the Hollywood parts Jeff Bridges would have played 20 years ago. Guy Pearce feels weirdly miscast as Cima’s gruff father Pops.

The opening cast credits name an Academy Award-winning actor who notably does not appear for much of the film, which may lead viewers – like me – to spend much of the movie waiting for her to arrive. When she does it is in a genuine bizarre third act excursion that feels both tonally disjointed and remarkably silly. The subsequent denouement makes one wonder precisely what the purpose of the preceding two hours actually was.

Admittedly it is regularly a quite pretty movie, particularly the numerous montage scenes of Hig’s Cessna flying around the Rocky Mountains – although anybody whose visited northern Italy will probably recognise where The Dog Stars was actually filmed.

As noted above, Ridley Scott is almost 89. This feels like a film directed by an old man. While I would love for him to stay around forever, it is clear that there are only going to be a few more decent films out of him at best before he retires or dies. Having one of them be The Dog Stars makes me feel like I’ve been robbed of one of them.