Asteroid City proves Wes Anderson can’t be copied, by AI or anyone else

Review of Asteroid City comes from the movie’s premiere screening at the Cannes Film Festival. Expect more on the movie as we get closer to the film’s theatrical opening in June.

Film lovers have never been in danger of mistaking a Wes Anderson movie for anybody else’s work, but he’s only become more distinctive with age. As both a storyteller and a visual stylist, Anderson produces hyper-decorative, deceptively poignant work that’s instantly recognizable. It’s also eye-pleasing enough to have spawned fashion trends, photography books, hit Instagram accounts, and a recent wave of AI-generated art and lifestyle TikTok parodies that offer definitive proof that there’s a huge distance between artistry and algorithm. His trademark twee aesthetic has now become an integral part of the popular culture. Asteroid City proves there’s still nobody quite like Wes Anderson.

Anderson has been making grand, jubilant, aching, profound films for decades now, but he’s moved away from the naturalistic, heart-on-sleeve sensibility of Bottle Rocket, Rushmore” The Royal Tenenbaums. He’s headed to the next level as a filmmaker by focusing on visually opulent flights of fancy. His latest movies — from the Matryoshka doll-nested neo-baroque architecture of Grand Budapest Hotel to the sparkling jeu d’esprit of The French Dispatch — Move away from modern times and back into the past, with a lavish, but disarmingly honest, profusion of detail.

Asteroid CityHis 11th film, a re-creation in 1955 of midcentury American Southwest is just as ambitious. Asteroid City, a desert town in Arizona named after a large meteor crater near a celestial observatories was named because of the nearby observatory and massive meteorite crater. It’s a tiny outpost of civilization (population: 87) against the sun-scorched terrain and turquoise skies of the surrounding landscape.

Image: Pop. Focus Features/87 Productions

Local attractions include a 12-seat luncheonette with a single-pump, an eight-cabin hotel and a phone booth. Mushroom clouds loom in the distance, as a somber reminder of the era’s nuclear paranoia. Station wagons in a state of disrepair and an incomplete off-ramp hint at the bustling community that once was planned. But now, most of the traffic — including a government train carrying Pontiacs, pecans, and nuclear warheads — is just passing through.

Asteroid City doesn’t open in this desert town. The show begins on a studio black-and white set with a Rod Serlingesque host.Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston) frames the entire movie as a stage play that was never performed, presented by a company of New York stage actors, including the Tennessee Williams-adjacent playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and his leading actors, Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman) and Mercedes Ford (Scarlett Johansson). “Asteroid City does not exist,” the host says. “It is an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication.”

Establishing the American West and New York’s legendary Actors Studio as the corners of mythological Americana hovering just outside the action, Anderson darts back to the desert with the cheek of a roadrunner meep-meeping through the frame. As the frame segment’s boxy aspect ratio opens up into eye-popping widescreen, the main players — including four teenage science prodigies and their families — are convening for the 1955 Junior Stargazer Competition, to be judged by a five-star military general (Jeffrey Wright) and an acclaimed, aloof astronomer (Tilda Swinton, though that might go without saying).

For Augie Steenbeck (Schwartzman), a war photographer still grieving his dead wife, packing his three daughters and brainiac son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) into a wood-sided Mercury Monterey and heading into the desert is a challenge — especially since he hasn’t told the kids about their mother’s death yet. “The time is never right,” he tells his father-in-law (Tom Hanks), who responds in kind, “The time is always wrong.”

Photo: Pop. Photo: Pop.

Movie star Midge Campbell (Johansson), meanwhile, is rehearsing for a new role — one of the “tragic, abused alcoholics” she’s known for playing — as she accompanies her stargazer daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) to Asteroid City. Midge and Augie settle down to a pleasant conversation after Midge enters the cabin opposite Augie. In another town, a young teacher (Maya Hawke), struggling to keep her pupils in line, is being watched by a handsome Cowpoke. Steve Carell (the motel owner) is always polite and accomodating to his customers.

Anderson’s ensemble casts are at this point as synonymous with his style as any of his visual trademarks, and every actor here is in step with his eccentric dialogue. Schwartzman has been a mainstay in Anderson films since the RushmoreThe spotlight is on Days Asteroid CityHe nails the sly and quintessentially Andersonian mix of humor and sadness. This script, written by Anderson with Roman Coppola as co-author of the story, is among Anderson’s most precise and poignant work.

Anderson achieves a delicate balance as the Stargazer Convention is delayed and disrupted, and Anderson tries to portray the New York theatre company’s struggles in accurately portraying the action. Jones finds Augie’s grief unfathomable, wondering out loud, “Am I doing him right?” But that sensation of being lost in the role is part of what brings him closer to something resembling the truth.

Anderson’s ingenious framing device, which has actors playing actors playing actors, sets all these characters against each other in ways that boost Asteroid CityThe trailers portray a film that is amiable and charming, but the movie itself has a richer story. Anderson is focusing on the great cosmic mysteries of existence — some in outer space, some terrestrial, and based in human emotion. His recent films have made it clear that he’s a richly philosophical filmmaker, and that he enjoys studying his artistic preoccupations from a distance — through the fog of memory in Grand Budapest HotelBy making storytelling itself a topic in The French Dispatch.

Photo: Pop. Photo: Pop.

Anderson’s signature pastel color palette, obsessively symmetrical compositions, and swirling layers of artifice open up entire worlds in miniature. His carefully designed and constructed movie dioramas often collapse the distance between cinema, theater, and other visual art forms, like the “living pictures” that preceded radio. Across their longtime collaboration, he and cinematographer Robert Yeoman have rewritten the rules of the rapid tracking shot: It’s difficult to think of any other filmmaker who pans and tilts the camera with his level of refinement and deadpan wit.

Anderson’s films are just as distinctive in their emotional thrust. While the characters in Anderson’s films are fantastical and full of adventure, they also possess a deep sense for escapism. The exotic locations in his books make them seem like distant, familiar dreams. The heart of the story is nostalgia. Asteroid City just as much as it’s been in his past films, even though the imaginative design is so much more fanciful than actual history.

Anderson keeps rapidly advancing as a filmmaker, making his worlds more exaggerated and artificial with each new project, while gently inviting his audience to accept the universality of his characters’ emotions. The film is the latest in a series of films that Anderson has been making. He keeps moving forward as a director, making each project more artificial and exaggerated while inviting his audiences to accept their universal emotions. Asteroid City, he’s conveying something essential about the role of artistic creation and re-creation, of art itself — particularly in the way it helps people process trauma and the unexpected. According to his views, art helps us learn what we know and what we don’t. It’s enjoyable on the surface level, but it’s also a layered existential poem. It’s Wes Anderson at his most mature and magical — and at his most singular, in a way no one else can capture — especially not AI.

Asteroid CityIn America, the film opens in limited theaters on 16 June and will then be released to all audiences on 23 June.