Asteroid City

MOVIE #1,220 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 11.02.23 WES ANDERSON: DIRECTOR FOCUS Today I am starting a new weekly series that will run every Thursday for the remainder of 2023. I'll be revisiting the entire Wes Anderson filmography in reverse chronological order. I had previously eschewed doing one of these in a nonlinear fashion but I'm making an exception here for a few reasons. For starters, I'm already deeply familiar with his catalog and I actually rewatched "The Big Three" (in my eyes) — Rushmore, Tenenbaums & Darjeeling — just last year, though not for review purposes. I've actually yet to see The French Dispatch after being thoroughly turned off by Isle of Dogs. So I'll start at the present and work my way backwards, all the way to 1994's Bottle Rocket short film.

Although this post is coming out in November, I'm actually typing this in late June, having just seen Asteroid City in the theater on the weekend of its opening wide release. And, in a nutshell, I pretty much loved every facet of this. I'll do an "official ranking" at the end of this, but my initial gut reaction says this has the best chance of cracking into the aforementioned "Big Three" — it's a fantastic film, and it very well might be his most interesting and original to date.

For someone with such a unique, expertly honed and instantly recognizable style, his movies are ripe for fatigue. Like many others, I've often wondered why he never strays from not just his visual motifs but his equally identifiable approach to dialogue. He's truly beyond parody at this point, which is why the underlying themes of Asteroid City felt so fresh to me even if what we're seeing on screen is not.

But to the latter: this also might be Wes Anderson on steroids in that department and there was something thrilling about that as well. Here he blends every stock element in his wheelhouse — from stop-motion and miniatures to his trademark symmetrical framing, intricate set design and fast pans to everything and anything else — and blows it up and out to the nth degree. This movie looks so good that it would still be enjoyable even if it had nothing at all to say. The fact that is has A LOT to say, both about the artistic process (and more to the point: Wes Anderson's process) and about basic human emotions like grief and love, is what makes this film truly special. He's hit home with showcasing true humanity before (see, yet again, "The Big Three") but never has he ventured into this meta territory before. He dares to ask the question, what's the point of all of this really?

Without getting too into spoilers, the entire cast breaks away from the narrative in the final moments and begins chanting, "You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep." This isn't quite the riddle that it appears on the surface. Rather, it felt more like a simple plea.

You have to submit to what you're seeing completely if you truly want to glean anything meaningful out of the experience. Nobody involved in this production half-assed it (clearly!) and neither can the audience. It's a two-way street or none of this works. An older couple walked out of the theater deep into the second act during my viewing. This Wes Anderson IS too much Wes Anderson. And that might have been a bad thing if it wasn't so clearly the point.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,219 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,221 ⫸

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Asteroid City is a 2023 American science fiction comedy-drama film written, directed, and produced by Wes Anderson, from a story he wrote with Roman Coppola. It features an ensemble cast, including Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Steve Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan and Jeff Goldblum. Its metatextual plot simultaneously depicts the events of a Junior Stargazer convention in a retrofuturistic version of 1955, staged as a play, and the creation of the play. It is Anderson's homage to popular memory and mythology about extraterrestrials and UFOs witnessed in the Southwestern desert in close proximity to atomic test sites during the postwar period of the American 20th century. It was released on May 23, 2023.