Nine years. That's how long since Ridley Scott made a sci-fi movie, and if that sounds wrong to you, sit with it for a second. The man who gave us Alien and Blade Runner has been off busy elsewhere and now he's back in the genre he basically built. The Dog Stars arrives August 28, and it's been circled on my calendar for months.

The cast is the part that gets me. Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin and Margaret Qualley leading a Ridley Scott sci-fi thriller. Elordi's been on a genuinely interesting run, Brolin has never met a gruff survivor role he couldn't crush, and the pairing of those two in a post-something world sounds like catnip to me. It adapts Peter Heller's novel about a pilot navigating life after a pandemic wipes out most of humanity, so we're in quiet-apocalypse territory rather than laser-blasts territory. Think The Martian's loneliness with more dread attached.

And the man just keeps working. That never stops being wild to me.

I'll level with you about my bias here. I've been saying for a while that the Alien property is doing its best work in games right now, and part of the reason is that Scott's film sensibility, the patience, the atmosphere, the dread that builds in silence, has been hard to replicate on the big screen lately. If anyone's going to prove me wrong it's the guy who created the template in the first place. Him coming back to intimate, character-first sci-fi feels like a correction the genre needed.

The release date is interesting too. Late August used to be a dumping ground, but The Dog Stars is positioning itself as counterprogramming, a quieter adult drama landing while the summer blockbusters burn out. Smart move. Not everything needs to fight for the biggest screens. Sometimes you just want a movie about one guy, a plane, and the end of the world.

So that's my August 28 sorted. If you're going, go big screen, ideally with the best sound your theater has, because Scott movies are built for that. And if you catch it opening weekend, let me know what you think. I'll be the guy in the back row pretending he isn't emotional about a Ridley Scott sci-fi movie existing again.