Movie Review: ‘Asteroid City’

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Leiv Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawk, Steve Carell

Plot: A group of junior inventors and their families get quarantined in the small desert town of Asteroid City after witnessing an alien.

Review: There are some directors whose next project is always something to look forward. Edgar Wright, for example, often takes on new genres, applying his distinct style to horror or documentary. It’s getting difficult to stay excited for the next Wes Anderson movie though…repetition of a visual style, the same cast of actors and the same quirky, deadpan personalities start to get predictable. It’s frustrating that we keep coming back to ‘this is the most Wes Anderson movie yet’ each time it comes round to writing a review.

Set in the 1950s, we get Anderson’s typical layered narrative to create a disconnect between the viewer and the stylised world. Bryan Cranston is a a TV host of a live presentation about the production of a play named ‘Asteroid City’ written by the legendary Conrad Earp (Norton). We switch between Conrad and his lead actor Jones Hall (Schwartzman) working out the character’s arc and the events of the play presented as reality. Here we follow Augie Steenbeck (also Schwartzman), a recently widowed father of four. He’s bringing his son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) to a convention of junior astronomers and inventors to Asteroid City to witness a lunar event. Whilst there, Augie begins a romance with famed movie actor Midge Campbell (Johansson). When an alien arrives and takes the asteroid for which the town is named, everyone visiting is locked down and forced to confront their place in the universe.

This feels like a personal story, a creative person’s introspective search for meaning in their life. We love Anderson’s style, and the retro-futurism style meshes with it really well. It feels inevitable that the vintage production style favoured by Anderson should eventually pass through the 1950s flying saucer craze. Much of the main interactions in the film wind up taking place through windows of bland coloured cabins, so it often feels as though this setting isn’t always being used to the best effect. The use of puppetry in bringing to live the alien creature and some local wildlife is also a big plus…the final credits puppet sequence is simply delightful.

When we get to the end of the story, and expect things to get tied together, it kind of fizzles out. Most of the characters depart the setting without any resolution, leaving many of the main characters in the same place they started out. Augie/Jones’ character arc lands at the opposite end of the spectrum, with scene that lays everything out on the table to the degree that it feels more like a film student rather than a master of the craft.

Although there is much of this film – from the cast to the style – that works for us this is one Anderson film that doesn’t land well for us. We’ll still be here for the next one though.

Rating: SIX out of TEN