Jonathan Millar 
Anil Krishna 
James Oconner 
Is The Dog Stars the new The Last of Us? The similarities are surprising, but there is one big difference
© HBO / 20th Century Studios
A pandemic, a devastated America, and protagonists carrying around more grief than they probably know what to do with—the comparison between The Dog Stars and The Last of Us is pretty much unavoidable. Ridley Scott’s new film, starring Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin, drops into a familiar post-apocalyptic landscape, with empty roads, isolated survivors and a world where trusting the wrong person can be just as dangerous as the disaster that destroyed everything. Based on Peter Heller’s novel, the story follows Hig, a pilot living at an abandoned airport in Colorado with his dog Jasper and the survivalist Bangley. Hig has settled into a strange kind of routine, but that changes when a mysterious radio transmission comes through and gives him a reason to leave the safety of his base and find out whether there is anyone else still out there.
That setup obviously brings The Last of Us to mind, but there is an interesting little detail people might miss: The Dog Stars actually came first. Heller’s novel was published in August 2012, while Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us arrived in June 2013. That doesn’t mean The Last of Us borrowed from Heller, especially since the game had already been announced publicly in 2011, but the timing is still fascinating. Both stories emerged around the same period and ended up exploring very similar fears about pandemics, isolation and what happens to people when the world they knew simply disappears.
Two pandemics, one very empty America
The biggest similarity is obviously the setting. In The Dog Stars, a devastating flu pandemic wipes out much of the world’s population, and by the time the story begins, nine years have passed since civilization collapsed. Hig lives in a world where most of the systems people once took for granted are gone, and even a simple trip outside can turn into a life-or-death situation. The Last of Us takes things in a different direction with its Cordyceps infection, and its main story begins two decades after the outbreak, but the result is familiar: America has been broken apart.
Both stories give us a country made up of abandoned places, isolated communities, hostile groups and huge stretches of land where people have almost completely disappeared. It is the sort of post-apocalyptic imagery that has become closely associated with The Last of Us in particular, so seeing similar landscapes in The Dog Stars is bound to make viewers think of Joel and Ellie. The difference is really in what each story chooses to do with that empty world once the initial shock of the apocalypse has worn off.
Hig and Joel are both carrying the same kind of loss
The more interesting connection between the two stories isn’t actually the pandemic. It’s the men at the center of them. Hig loses his wife Melissa during the outbreak and never really escapes the grief that follows, while Joel loses his daughter Sarah right at the beginning of The Last of Us. Both men survive physically, but emotionally they are stuck in a much messier place, trying to figure out whether there is still a reason to care about anything.
Hig, though, is different from Joel in some important ways. He still has a softer side that Bangley often sees as a weakness, and he keeps doing things that make him feel connected to the old world—flying, fishing, watching nature, caring for Jasper and, most importantly, looking for other people. Joel has built much harder walls around himself, and it takes Ellie to start breaking those walls down. The stories approach it differently, but underneath both is the same uncomfortable question: if surviving is all you’ve got left, what exactly are you surviving for?
Nature isn’t just decoration in The Dog Stars
There is another visual similarity that is hard to miss. Both The Dog Stars and The Last of Us are fascinated by what happens when humans disappear and nature starts taking the spaces back. The games and HBO series turned overgrown streets, ruined buildings and vegetation-covered cities into some of their most recognizable imagery, making the world feel strangely beautiful even when everything around it has fallen apart.
In Heller’s novel, though, nature carries a little more weight than simply making the apocalypse look pretty. Hig notices changes in the environment, disappearing species and shifting ecosystems, and the story connects the collapse of civilization with broader concerns about the climate and humanity’s relationship with the natural world. The Last of Us certainly has those ideas too, but nature there is often part of the visual language of the ruined world. In The Dog Stars, it feels more directly tied to what the story is trying to say about civilization and how fragile the whole thing really is.
The big difference: there are no infected monsters
This is where the comparison starts to fall apart. The Dog Stars isn’t a zombie story, and there are no Clickers waiting around the next corner. The pandemic destroys society, but it doesn’t turn the survivors into some new breed of monster. The real danger comes from other human beings, dwindling supplies and a world where the rules people once followed have basically stopped meaning anything.
The Last of Us has both kinds of danger. Joel and Ellie have to worry about other survivors, some of whom are incredibly violent, but they also have to deal with the infected throughout their journey. That changes the rhythm of the story quite a bit. The Dog Stars is much more interested in the question of what ordinary people become when civilization disappears and there is nobody left to enforce the rules. In that sense, it is less of a monster survival story and more of a bleak character drama about people trying not to lose whatever humanity they have left.
Bangley is almost the version of Joel that Hig refuses to become
Josh Brolin’s Bangley is probably one of the most interesting characters to put next to Joel. His philosophy is brutally straightforward: protect your territory, get rid of threats before they become bigger problems and don’t trust strangers. For Bangley, survival comes first. Everything else is secondary, maybe even unnecessary.
Joel isn’t quite that extreme, but he carries some of the same instincts. After losing Sarah and spending years surviving in a brutal world, he learns that getting attached to people can be dangerous. The difference is that The Last of Us puts that conflict mostly inside Joel himself, while The Dog Stars splits it between Hig and Bangley. Hig represents the part that still wants connection, while Bangley represents the part that says connection is exactly what gets you killed. It’s a pretty simple contrast on paper, but it gives the story much of its emotional tension.
The Dog Stars has a different idea of hope
The biggest difference between the two stories, though, comes down to love and hope. The Last of Us treats human connection as something incredibly powerful, but also something that can become destructive. Joel finds a reason to live again through Ellie, yet that love eventually pushes him toward a decision that is morally messy at best, which is exactly why the ending has remained so heavily debated.
The Dog Stars is somewhat more willing to believe that starting over might actually be possible. Hig has lost almost everything, but he continues looking for beauty, companionship and some kind of future. His journey isn’t simply about staying alive another day. He refuses to accept that breathing and eating and hiding are enough to call something a life.
And that’s probably the best way to look at the The Dog Stars and The Last of Us comparison. They begin in remarkably similar places—a ruined America, a deadly pandemic and people who have been emotionally wrecked by loss—but they aren’t really trying to reach the same destination. The Last of Us is deeply interested in the complicated, sometimes ugly consequences of love, while The Dog Stars is more interested in whether human connection can give people a reason to keep going after almost everything else is gone. So, no, The Dog Stars isn’t exactly the new The Last of Us. But the fact that both stories can look at the end of the world and come away with such different ideas about what it means to be human is what makes the comparison worth having in the first place.
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