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Would you trade the security of your surviving family for a cigarette? Did the apocalypse count if there’s coffee? Do you really get to shoot all the ones with tattoos? Is there any difference between Mormons and Mennonites ultimately? These are some of the questions going around in my mind after watching Ridley Scott’s dangerously enjoyable new film, The Dog Stars.

Let’s get this straight: young Hig (Jacob Elordi) looks super good crossing the wasteland in his loose white jeans and he knows all the tech talk, but when he takes the Cessna up to see what he might forage, the gorgeous empty mountain valleys and prairies belong solidly to the old men of the movie.

Bangley (Josh Brolin) the ex-Marine killing machine and Pops (Guy Pearce) the cowboy, both pushing 60, are the hands that hold down the rug which really ties this rambling film together. The only other member of their age group on the scene, Darlene (Allison Janney), is pretty much a harpy and not going to annoy them by upsetting their bachelor ways.

You can have your Cormac McCarthy Road nonsense of burnt and poisoned landscapes – we got verdant summer scenery here with minimal humans. Even a cannibals’ kitchen comes bright and clean. At heart this is a film about old guys leading their best lives among the ruins of the nanny-state modern world, handily emptied out by a flu pandemic, not nuclear war or climate change. Maybe Ridley Scott felt for Brolin’s sad fate as the young Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss in No Country For Old Men and brought him back for another shot at survival, with better weapons?

Hig himself, when he is not in mourning for a lost love or gently falling into a new one, seems to get what’s going on when he tells his buddy: “This world fits you Bangley. Wake up. Defend. Survive.” For Hig, though, there may just be a future to build.

You feel Scott was enjoying himself with this film and if it may not be in the same league as Alien or Gladiator, it still moves smoothly in a way Gladiator II, hobbled by audience and studio expectations, did not. Film buffs may also enjoy Scott’s nods to his earlier films – there are a few shocks worthy of Alien and a startling interlude that feels like the toy scene in Blade Runner. But what you get all in all is a pretty mellow cinema experience. With home-made bullets.