Review of Asteroid City, directed by Wes Anderson

I don’t know when the first time I technically watched a Wes Anderson movie was, but I know that since then, I’ve seen almost all of his movies. To be frank, although he has such a distinct style as a director that people seem to go rabid for, I don’t love a good chunk of his work.

Some of his movies, like The Grand Budapest Hotel, are really good. Others, though, like The French Dispatch I saw in this theaters and I particularly didn’t care for it. But when it was time for Asteroid City to come out, I was slammed with the trailers for it whenever I’d go to the theater on my AMC A List subscription.

You’d think that I would be conditioned to see this movie in theaters because of it. I kept booking a seat in the theater, canceling it, and then trying again another day.

I never did end up seeing it in theaters because it didn’t really last long at my local theater (guess no one was watching it), but one day I was wandering the DVD section of my library, found a copy of the movie in the new section, and just decided to go for it then and there.

Let’s get into the review then, shall we?

Inside the world of a play, a youth astronomy convention witnesses an alien arrival.

Like many of Anderson’s other works as of late, there are many moving parts to this movie. Let’s break them down as simply as possible. It’s important to note that the movie is set in a retro version of the fifties, which is why the aesthetic is the way it is.

We open the film up with a television host talking about a playwright, who is well celebrated in this world, and his fictional play Asteroid City.

Set in Asteroid City, the movie transitions into color and the world of the play. We’re thrust into Asteroid City, where war photojournalist Augie has just arrived to the astronomy convention with his son and three daughters. After the car breaks down, he calls his father-in-law, who berates Augie for not telling the kids about the fact their mother died, which he still hasn’t done.

They arrive in Asteroid City and at the convention, where they meet a famous actress, Midge, and her daughter. The father and son duo are set to fall in love with this mother and daughter, but we haven’t gotten to that point yet.

We also learn that there’s a second story going on, and the movie cuts to the world outside of the play (aka: the real world), and we learn a little bit more about the playwright and the actor he wants to cast into the play.

They become lovers, they recruit students from a local acting school to round out the rest of the cast, but then drama happens when that actor who became his lover proves out to be a bit of an uncertain fellow when it comes to his character.

He also has an encounter with the actress whose only scene is cut on the play, as she was to play the mother.

Everyone else continues to arrive at the convention, and this is a wide cast of characters that can lean towards Anderson’s sense of humor, like the schoolchildren on the bus that make very specific comments periodically.

The military general holds a ceremony where he greets everyone with the crater located inside of the city, but in the middle of his speech, a groovy alien shows up and steals the meteorite that was in the middle of the crater. Everyone is then placed under quarantine and is forced to be examined.

The outside world finds out about the affair, and it goes viral on newspapers across the country. This pisses off the general, who wants to end the quarantine, but then the alien shows up again to return the meteorite, forcing him to put everyone back under quarantine because the alien just screwed everything up for them.

The people then rise up using their inventions (don’t doubt nerdy science kids), and then the military is defeated.

The playwright does not long after this, and then an epilogue tells us that Augie’s family leaves the city last after the quarantine is lifted.

Overall Thoughts

Well, it’s a Wes Anderson film, that’s for sure. I think there is a lot of nuance to this movie and commentary about the arts in the scenes with the playwright, but this split style just doesn’t do it for me with his work.

I had similar sentiments when it came to The French Dispatch—I thought that the split style worked better in that movie, but it still felt too fragmented of a narrative device for me as a viewer.

I’m sure someone else loves this movie (and The French Dispatch), and that’s fine! Taste is very subjective.

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