Asteroid City

Image credit: Syfy.com

Yesterday felt like the perfect day to do something that I haven’t done in a very long time: take myself to the movies. The movie of choice: Wes Anderson’s latest, Asteroid City. It’s funny, with my zeal for movies somewhat dimmed by the pandemic and life in general, I hadn’t thought about Wes Anderson for quite some time, nor had I really kept up with his cinematic endeavours. I was reminded how much I used to enjoy his films the other night – Movie Night, a weekly event with one of my best friends – when we watched Moonrise Kingdom, quite possibly my favourite Anderson film. So after a dentist appointment yesterday, I figured why not treat myself?

Asteroid City, so named for the town it’s set in that holds a meteorite that fell to earth, tells the story of a group of parents and intensely smart children who travel to the tiny desert town to accept awards for their contributions to science. What was meant to be a short stopover, turns into a weeklong stop when the awards ceremony is interrupted with the arrival of an alien. Unsure how to process this encounter of the third kind, the government puts the town under quarantine. And while the adults try to make sense of their own inner turmoils, their kids are coming up with a plan to share their encounter (and military imprisonment) with the rest of the country.

In a fun turn of metafiction, the film is actually a play that is being put on and we the audience are being taken on a behind-the-scenes walkthrough of the process. Broken into acts and scenes, the behind-the-scenes part is shot in black and white while the movie (or play) is in technicolour. Anderson pays homage to the camp westerns of the 1950s with a backdrop that is very obviously cardboard, sparse sets, and over-zealous lighting. This gives the film that fun and quirky Anderson vibe that his devoted cinephiles love.

Like Moonrise Kingdom and Isle of Dogs, Asteroid City tells a simple story that is divided into two parties: the kids and the adults. The adults spend the film trying to make sense of their own lives and characters, questioning their own actions and motives, while the kids are more concerned with the awesome phenomena that they’ve just witnessed. While the young kids celebrate the idea that we are not alone in the universe, the young adults determine to use their intelligence to share the story and point out the ineptitude of the grownups.

Image credit: frewsalima.blogspot.com

Relationships and emotions are engagingly stunted and flatlined throughout, as is the favoured character style in Anderson's later films. And the cast are all brilliant, relying on physical actions and gestures to convey the inner drama that plagues their characters.

Like many of Anderson's films, Asteroid City is a fun exploration into the building blocks of performance and cinema; brightly lit, ironically camp, and featuring a less than subtle reference to Mars Attacks (see if you can pick it up). I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Director: Wes Anderson, 2023

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Edward Norton, Tom Hanks, Scarlet Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Maya Hawke, Adrian Brody, Geoffrey Wright, Grace Edwards, Jake Ryan, Sophia Lillis, Live Schreiber, Bryan Cranston, & Margot Robbie.