If you’re a Wes Anderson fan, you will probably really like Asteroid City. If you are new to the quirky style of the director, this movie might leave you wondering what the heck you just saw. And you may just find yourself thinking you ought to see it a second time to make sense of it – and you just might enjoy it too.
Asteroid City has a spectacular, all-star cast, and it is clear they all had a fantastic time acting in this film. Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Edward Norton, Margot Robbie, William DeFoe, Tilda Swinton… and so many more. Anderson has wrangled together many other actors who have been in some of his earlier films, lending an offbeat but undeniable synergy to the cast.
Vignettes of the various actors are curiously stitched together – in Wes Anderson fashion – and as usual for his unusual style, it works. The young actors are excellent in their roles. Jake Ryan gets the most kid-screen time and deserves it. It’s not his first Anderson movie, and it likely will not be his last – that’s a good thing.
The movie is told in narrative, in the form of a play that has been turned into a movie and flickers back and forth between a stage play and cinema. The setting is pure Wes Anderson – sparse, bright, daringly unreal. The infinitesimally small desert town of Asteroid City exists only because an asteroid impacted there millions of years ago, making it, apparently, the perfect location for a stargazing event. It’s around the late 1950s, before the Space Race but at a time when the curiosity of space and the inundation of pulp fiction sci-fi are burgeoning. A group of extraordinarily intelligent teens and their parents are thrown together in a hastily cobbled space cadet/stargazer/geek camp.
The movie has a number of laugh-out-loud moments, sight gags, and even more oddball set-ups that will make you first laugh, then think. The score by Alexandre Desplat is buried beneath 1950s pop songs, but strings together the scenes giving them coherence among the orchestrated Anderson chaos.
If you’re looking for a movie that will have you questioning small-town American reality, this is it. Chock-a-block with allegory, metaphor, and stars galore, it’s quite entertaining. And disorienting. It’s Wes Anderson, all that’s to be expected.