Film Review - Asteroid City
Images courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Wes Anderson’s latest film, Asteroid City is weird, and profoundly touching. Set predominantly in a play within a television special, the film follows war photographer and recent widower Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), who finds himself trapped in the titular town, along with his teenage son and triplet daughters on their way to a convention for budding young scientific minds. There they meet father-in-law Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks), actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), Junior Stargazer convention host General Gibson (Jeffrey Wright), along with a bounty of Anderson's longtime collaborators and other assorted A-list actors. However quaint the story might sound, what's going on under the surface is anything but.
Much like last year's Nope, the film takes sci-fi and western pulp and puts it under the microscope of postmodernism, using the fantastical and bizarre plot as set dressing for a strikingly humanistic look at the artistic process, its relationship with how we deal with grief, how we connect with art in our own personal ways, and the meaning of life itself. Intense stuff, right? Thankfully Anderson injects just the right amount of humour and affection to balance out the head-scratching, showing to all the nay-sayers that he can still do his weird little symmetrical dollhouse schtick with clear-eyed intent.
Speaking of Anderson's visual identity, it's interesting to see him push his form even further here, to the point where it feels self-reflexive (much like Lynch with Inland Empire, or Dante with Gremlins 2: The New Batch). The landscape is littered in parched shades of gold, the sky a turquoise so vivid it'd make tropical getaway stock photo wallpapers blush. Anderson breaks away from his more rigid camera techniques to include dialogue-motivated dollying, and there's even a brief sequence that uncannily blends stop motion with live action. It's very much in the same realm as his previous works, so those already finding his style indigestible likely won't find themselves converted, yet through a certain degree of restraint shown towards the typically lavish production design, it seems he's found a happy medium between his aesthetic and not wanting to overwhelm or detract from the emotional core with sets full of bells and whistles.
"You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep."
There comes a certain point where the film takes a cosmic turn and introduces an alien; Alexandre Desplat's score echoing a whimsical John Williams. Though this invader's visit is brief and seemingly innocuous, it sends the inhabitants of Asteroid City into disarray, resulting in a military lockdown. Its motive is never explained, but it ties in well with Augie's grief over his wife's passing. Like death, sometimes events just happen without reason or warning and they change our lives forever.
Due to its sheer density, it could be up to a toss of the coin whether Asteroid City's existential, Lynchian thematic throughlines and meta framing land, but I've found the narrative beats that exceeded my grasp only leaving me wanting to revisit it sooner. Sometimes nothing makes sense, and you just have to keep playing your part until you figure it out (you're doing great, by the way). For all of its idiosyncrasies, Asteroid City is an out-of-this-world homerun for its director, ranking up there with Wes' very best.
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Asteroid City is screening in cinemas from Thursday 10th August. For tickets and more info, click here.