Asteroid City Review: Wes Anderson Unleashes A Meta, Looney Tunes-Esque Delight

In a day and age of risk-averse cinema, increased stylistic homogenization, and obsession with intellectual properties, the films of writer/director Wes Anderson have a special creative potency. On a general level, audiences have expectations that are consistently met (dry-but-witty dialogue, precocious children, pastel colors, and tracking shots galore, to name a few), but the features surprise, engage, and stand apart with smart and complex personalities, odd narratives, and what registers as works of an unimpeded auteur. Like many of his peers from the 1980s/1990s class of indie writer/directors, Anderson’s uncompromised vision continues to have an important place in modern cinema, and his latest, the delightful, cartoony Asteroid City, is here to reconfirm that truth.

Certainly one of the filmmaker’s more whimsical efforts (never getting anywhere particularly close to the heavier beats in The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, or The Grand Budapest Hotel), the movie not only delivers Looney Tunes-esque silliness that comes paired with one of cinema’s most awkward alien invasions, but wraps the whole thing in a meta presentation that sees the events of the story unfold as a play within a presentation about the creation of said play, complete with a Rod Serling-esque narrator played by Bryan Cranston. Needless to say, it’s not a film that is going to convert anyone who has already decided that Wes Anderson’s style is not their thing, but those anticipating his most genre-centric work since The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou will not be left disappointed.

The play within the making of the play finds an ensemble cast of characters gathered together in the titular desert town to participate in the 1955 Junior Stargazer Convention, an event that brings together a group of young prodigies – Woodrow (Jake Ryan), Dinah (Grace Edwards), Clifford (Aristou Meehan), Shelly (Sophia Lillis), and Ricky (Ethan Josh Lee) – who have each crafted genius inventions and are competing for a scholarship prize. As the academic celebration unfolds, however, the teens, their parents, the event organizers, a visiting class of school children, and the locals are all stunned when a spaceship comes down out of the sky and an alien artlessly snatches the meteorite that inspired Asteroid City’s name.

Bewilderment results in a quarantine with an indefinite end date, and as the teenage geniuses collaborate and try to contact the outside world, Woodrow’s father, Augie (Jason Schwarzman), a recently widowed photographer, strikes up a bond with Dinah’s mother, Midge (Scarlett Johansson), an actor who is distracted preparing for her latest role. All the while, The Host (Cranston) guides us through the work of playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and we see his latest work come together amidst creative challenges, casting, and actor disputes.

Wes Anderson fans will be delighted by their trip to Asteroid City.

Asteroid City is minimalist in its scope and setting, but it’s also Wes Anderson at his broadest – as though the filmmaker is liberated by the fiction of the play within a movie while still working within rules of the aesthetic (the idea of everything playing out on a theatrical stage). The mention of Looney Tunes above is actually more literal than figurative, as the film borrows heavily from the classic cartoons, right down perfect mushroom clouds in the distance from A-bomb testing, to the occasional appearance of a roadrunner that goes, “Meep meep.”

Between the orange of the desert sand and the clear blue sky, the Anderson color palette is in full effect, and there are some perfectly framed, intimate-yet-distant moments between Augie and Midge as they chat from windows in their neighboring bungalows – but that’s just scratching the surface of the auteur’s touches. The director empties his full bag of tricks in the making of Asteroid City to brilliant effect, from his trademark horizontally-traveling tracking shots elegantly adding to the idea that we’re watching everything play out on a stage, to stop-motion animation being employed in the introduction of the alien. It all pops and wows, which is then used to contrast the meta world of the making of the play, which is all shot in black-and-white and doubles down on the stage play aesthetic with scenes mostly playing out two-dimensionally.

Asteroid City brings together a stellar ensemble, though some stars get shortchanged.

Always adding to the fun in titles of the writer/director’s oeuvre is his penchant for building all-star casts (at this point, mostly featuring actors with whom he’s previously worked), and Asteroid City is no exception – though it can’t be called Anderson’s most well-rounded work in this regard. Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson prove to have terrific chemistry and comedic timing together, and much like with Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson discovers some gifted young stars to play the teenage prodigies, but unlike the minimalist aesthetic, the ensemble sometimes feels overstuffed.

For example, Maya Hawke plays a school teacher doing her best to try and keep a class of students calm after the extraterrestrial encounter and quarantine, but it, along with some romantic tension she has with a local cowboy (Rupert Friend), ultimately feel underserved by the film. With that story included along with the other prodigy parents (Hope Davis, Steve Park, Liev Schreiber) freaking out about quarantine; the owner of the local motel (Steve Carell) orchestrating real estate deals from a vending machine; and Tom Hanks coming in as Augie’s disapproving father-in-law, the film tries to weave with a lot of different threads, but a lot of those threads are too thin for the good of the movie.

With its dual-layered story, meta commentary and extreme goofiness, Asteroid City is a movie that I feel I’ll (happily) need to see again in order to fully appreciate everything that’s presented – but after a first viewing, it can be said to be prime Wes Anderson albeit not peak. It doesn’t add new dimensions to his filmography, but it’s his most fun live-action film since 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom and a showcase of the director doing what he does best.