Does it ever nag at young stars of 2026, wondering what it might have been like to come up a few decades earlier? For the most part, they’re probably satisfied with their current situation, even if it involves fielding repeated questions about if and when they might want to play a superhero or in a Star War. But sometimes you see a movie like The Dog Stars, something that feels vaguely akin to a movie that could have come out in the summer of 1996 or 2006, and it’s easy to picture Jacob Elordi or Margaret Qualley pining for a past that, at least in Elordi’s case, predates his birth year.

At very least, they can’t be wholly unaware of the retro nature of the post-apocalyptic thriller/drama The Dog Stars, directed as it is by Ridley Scott, who at 88 qualifies as perhaps the oldest Old Pro in the business. (Clint Eastwood is older, but he may have actually retired.) Scott is actually in seemingly greater demand now than he was 30 years ago (his big release that year? The largely forgotten sailing drama White Squall), but part of his ongoing popularity with suits, stars, and audiences alike seems to be his facility with continuing to make movies for grown-ups as he did in the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s. Sure, he’ll do Gladiator II, but that’s a throwback to a throwback even with the brand name, and movies like House of Gucci, The Last Duel, and All the Money in the World are expensive, glossy, star-laden dramas.

That experience shepherding true move stars to iconic performances — Russell Crowe especially, but also Denzel Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore, and the whole Young Hollywood class of 2001 that appeared in Black Hawk Down, among many others — may have made him particularly attractive to two particularly attractive people: Elordi and Qualley, who both fall under the broad aura umbrella of “movie star” without necessarily being provable box office draws. Elordi has an Oscar nomination (for last year’s Frankenstein) and a recent hit (Wuthering Heights), while Qualley has led several films on her own, perhaps most notably the underrated neo-noir Honey Don’t! But it’s hard to say yet whether they’ve established a fanbase that will grow and follow them from movie to movie, in the manner of Scott’s biggest past collaborators (Denzel, DiCaprio, Damon).

The Dog Stars strips its stars down, though not in the way their respective fanbases might prefer. Elordi plays Hig, a contemplative mechanic and pilot (unclear whether he became the latter as a hobby or a necessity) living in the aftermath of a global pandemic that claimed his wife years earlier. Now a depopulated Earth has descended into roving factions of survivors, kind of a discount Mad Max that hasn’t yet gone full wasteland. Hig lives near an old airfield, splitting duties with his makeshift buddy Bangley (Josh Brolin), who takes a more fatalistic approach to civilization’s ruin; as Hig points out, he almost seems to relish the opportunity to arm up and defend his land. Hig, though, yearns for something more, and he’s heard a voice on his plane’s radio indicating there might be a more robust settlement just out of his normal flight range. En route to exploring that possibility, he meets Cima (Qualley), a former medical student running a mini-ranch with her Bangley-compatible father (Guy Pearce).

This means that Elordi and Qualley are practically outfitted and often seen fashionably smudged with dirt, though it only registers as a de-glamming when you realize how long it’s taking for their characters to visibly consider the possibility of sex. (Maybe they don’t want to end up with one of those inconvenient Quiet Place babies.) The opening section of the movie, which includes a lot of Elordi on his own or nearly so — Hig is accompanied by his loyal dog bestie on his supply runs into hollowed-out downtown Denver — confers a certain amount of trust in its leading actor. Will Smith, after all, was a leading man for over a decade before doing the post-apocalyptic solo walk in I Am Legend. At the same time, you can feel the movie hedging a little on Elordi’s natural likability when it makes his character so reasonable, sensitive, friendly, far less trigger-happy than Bangley, and genuinely concerned about his fellow man, even in a world that seems to actively discourage those considerations. As traumatized as Hig is, he doesn’t have much in the way of sharp or rough edges. It’s a relief that the movie doesn’t feel the need to artificially pump up his machismo, and Elordi plays his soulful sad-boy grieving well, though Frankenstein showed how much further he can take that sense of lonely despair. Qualley, for her part, has such an easy charisma that it takes a little while to realize the movie hasn’t given her much of a character.

Dog Stars is an R-rated Ridley Scott movie — there’s plenty of profanity, head shots, and one gnarly bit of gore — yet feels limited less by specific sci-fi/thriller conventions than a vaguely YA-adjacent sensibility; I was shocked to learn that the source novel is apparently literary fiction. The characters, almost too appropriate for Elordi and Qualley’s current Hollywood status, feel caught between archetypal heroes and a richer, sadder adulthood. (It feels slightly awkward to hear both Hig and Cima talk about their former spouses, even though Qualley herself was quite famously married to Jack Antonoff until recently.) Even the well-established Brolin, who’s very much playing a Josh Brolin Type here, does kind of a lite version of his thing, as if remembering the routines of his pre-pandemic self.

Despite the story’s prescient (given the book’s 2012 publication) grimness, the stars in front of and behind the camera do what glossy Hollywood pros are supposed to do. Elordi, Qualley, Brolin, and Scott’s visual prowess — killing of roving gang members depicted via green-splattery night-vision; an eerie settlement with a midcentury-airport aesthetic; the cool greens and blues of Erik Messerschmidt’s muted but beautiful cinematography — make The Dog Stars a perfectly diverting bit of entertainment. But just as the movie itself falls a little short of full satisfaction, its stars don’t feel quite fully formed in this showcase.

Maybe that’s okay. Neither Elordi or Qualley have yet fallen into the superhero trap, where the IP ultimately consumes the actor, no matter how good they are in the role. (Sometimes it’s weirdly worse for their long-term career if they’re genuinely great at it.) But there’s something telling about the fact each Dog Stars lead had a major status bump when they slathered on some grotesque makeup for auteur-driven horror riffs: Elordi in the aforementioned Frankenstein, and Qualley in The Substance, which positioned her as youthful sexuality incarnate (complete with prosthetic breasts) before subjecting her to a gruesome, rapid decay and body-horror mishaps. These are beautiful people, the movies seemed to say, but are they perhaps too beautiful for you to stare straight at them for prolonged periods?

Even with post-apocalyptic trappings, The Dog Stars can only scuff them up so much, which is probably the correct strategy; the filmmakers seem to understand that the project needs less complicated forms of their beauty and charisma. What the movie seems less sure about is how to move them forward, through this altered world.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.