Wes Anderson and Steven Spielberg use sci-fi the same way

Wes Anderson’s new movie has its final credits in the middle of the film Asteroid CityFeatures an unexpected title. In the “special thanks” section toward the end of the roll, listed alongside Anderson friends and past collaborators like Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, is Steven Spielberg, the most commercially successful director of all time. Spielberg’s work is known as popular entertainment. It can be in the form thrilling adventures, or sobering trips through horrors of 20th century. Anderson’s work is characterized by the creation of comical worlds that are meticulously constructed. The film is a comedy that has a deadpan tone. Asteroid CityIt becomes apparent that they are connected: both of them use science-fiction to explore loss and the sadness associated with a fractured family.

Anderson isn’t known as a sci-fi or fantasy director — but then, those are no longer Spielberg’s principal genres, either. Beyond any cracks about his movies seeming to take place on another planet entirely, Anderson’s last overt science fiction film was 2018’s dystopian stop-motion story Isle of Dogs, while 2014’s Grand Budapest Hotel contains elements of fantasy and alternate history, and 2004’s Steve Zissou, The Life AquaticFantastical and fictional creatures are featured. Asteroid City likely credits Spielberg because it takes some inspiration from 1977’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Spielberg’s first real sci-fi movie: When an alien ship makes contact with humans in the American desert in Asteroid City. The event was somewhat similar Close Encounters.

Focus Features

Close Encounters famously ends with a journey that Spielberg has since mused he wouldn’t have been comfortable with later in his career — Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) definitively leaves his wife and children, enters the visiting spaceship, and ascends with its mysterious beings into outer space toward points unknown. (Technically, Roy’s family has left him at this point due to his obsession with the aliens, but leaving Earth feels a bit more definitive on his end.) It’s not clear what the aliens are. Asteroid City, the aliens don’t exert quite so much physical power over the central family, led by Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman). The mother of Augie’s four children has already left, though not voluntarily. Augie tells his children that she died of a cancer-like illness weeks before the desert trip.

The alien encounter does, however, change the Steenbeck family, particularly Augie’s teenage son Woodrow (Jake Ryan), who is both fascinated and unsettled by the idea that humanity isn’t alone in this universe. He is overwhelmed by the evidence of humanity’s potential insignificance. It’s a notable reaction, because Anderson characters so often seem to be preemptively fighting off that sense of smallness, obsessing over their own hobbies or worlds as a way of exerting control in a messy, unpredictable world. Woodrow’s grief over his mother dovetails perfectly with his crisis of faith, because few things feel as messy or destabilizing as changes to your family.

That’s something Spielberg understands particularly well, and something that’s almost always present in his sci-fi movies. E.T. E.T.This film is about a divorced family. The father moved out, leaving his ex-wife struggling and son Elliott (Henry Thomas), feeling lonely and insecure. Spielberg’s War of the WorldsGives another absentee dad a terrifying chance to prove his parenting skills in the face of an alien attack. Minority ReportThe father is shown to be more dedicated (it’s the same actor no less!). After a tragic loss, closure is a way to move on. A.I. Artificial Intelligence, perhaps Spielberg’s best and boldest sci-fi film, follows a robot boy programmed to simulate familial love, then cast adrift when the family he serves no longer needs him to fill a particular void in their lives.

Focus Features

Like Spielberg’s work in the genre, Anderson’s sci-fi stories often feature families that are already fractured at the beginning of the film. Atari (KoyuRankin), has already lost both of his parents. Isle of DogsSpots’ (Liev Schireiber’s) exile on the island is a source of great concern to Spots. (It’s similar to the protective zeal Elliott feels for E.T., his own nonhuman pal.) Steve Zissou, Bill Murray The Life Aquatic, like Tom Cruise’s Ray from War of the Worlds, has essentially abdicated his role as father in favor of pursuing a life he pictured as a carefree younger man — though Steve is further gone, in that the child (referred to as “possibly my son”) grows into an adult before Steve has any contact with him.

The filmmakers’ characters are often drastically different. Spielberg’s stories are often characterized by a lot more movement while Anderson creates frames with smaller gestures that look like comics. Both filmmakers have been mistaken as being childish or fake-innocent because of their interest in fantasy and spectacle.

Yet while they both look at fantastical images through the perspectives of children, they also use the kid-with-his-train-set dynamic Spielberg depicts in The Fabelmans — no surprise that images of a train bookend Asteroid CityOr that Darjeeling Limited takes place largely inside of one — to move beyond simple Spielberg-face awe. They each communicate a sophisticated understanding about how we deal with loss and our relationship to the larger world.

Spielberg’s sci-fi trappings often seem to exist to clarify the gulfs between family members, which can’t always be bridged. Consider the early Agatha Christie. Minority ReportHer visions are as clear and heartbreaking as real memories, as she describes an alternative life that John Anderton, played by Cruise, could have lived. Or to the thousands of years little robot David (Haley Joel Osment) lives out, as his programming persists past the waning days of the humanity he’s supposed to imitate.

Warner Bros.

Anderson, meanwhile, sometimes takes a more meta approach, which fits with his characters’ self-consciousness. In Asteroid CityAnderson’s sci-fi stories, such as the one about the aliens, are just one example of his worlds inside worlds. The story — described as a play, framed as a TV show — frames its scenes from a distance, as a way of grappling with the infinite nature of the universe. Sci-fi allows us to peer into the unknowable, even though we may have to blush at times.

The depth is something that Anderson and Spielberg have in common. (Another unexpected stretch of common ground between them: They’ve both spawned numerous copycats.) Spielberg imitations tend to come from movies stuck in an ’80s-nostalgic idea of what his films are like, but the imitators are often thinking of E.T. Spielberg made some Amblin films decades ago. Anderson impersonations are likely to be impressions and parodies of his style. (Although some actual feature-length movies have been influenced by his style without really capturing his tone — looking at you, Paddington!)

What the imitators lack, though, and what the genuine articles share, is the sense that loss and grief recalibrate our personal worlds, recontextualizing them and — in ways that can be strange or even terrifying — opening them up.

Despite Spielberg’s reputation for uplift, his sci-fi interventions don’t always demonstrably heal the family in any given story. War of the WorldsIt’s more the exception in this case, as the film has the family facing a horrifying level of carnage on their way to a for-now happy ending. There’s a similar baptism-by-fire effect (though on a much smaller scale) with The Life AquaticSteve has to survive more losses ahead. Close EncountersMoments of awe between human beings and other species.

Focus Features

Steve’s heartbreaking reaction to the Jaguar Shark — “I wonder if it remembers me” — is more solipsistic than indicative of concern about his makeshift family. But it provides a window into the panic and emptiness he feels as he realizes that those closest to him aren’t any more permanent on this Earth than he is.

Anderson does deliver a more traditional resolution in Isle of DogsFeaturing heroism, and positive changes for his dystopia of the near future. Atari’s quest is fulfilled, and a new form of domestication achieved. That’s a more straightforward wrap-up than just about any of Spielberg’s big sci-fi projects get, save perhaps The Ready Player One.

Asteroid CityThis implies, in contrast, that Steenbecks must muddle their way through the losses, just like the family of the «in». E.T.Without that emotional crescendo scored by John Williams. It’s telling that despite the framing devices that call attention to the artifice of the desert-set portion of Asteroid City’s story, the movie still ends within that play-within-a-show. Far more than the many filmmakers who attempt to channel Spielberg’s crowd-pleasing mojo, Anderson is capable of conjuring real wonder with his version of science fiction. But as with Spielberg, his work resonates because it doesn’t neglect the empty spaces left in our lives, no matter how much wonder we experience.