Ashley Mckay

Asteroid City is a simple story; various groups of people are on journeys across California; some visiting Asteroid City itself, for the science fair. Some break down there, some make a pit stop en route to somewhere less ‘middle of nowhere’. But before all of this, we learn that we’re in a play, narrated by the brilliant Brian Cranston, that’s the device, and another time that Wes uses a clever exposition device without it feeling like lazy writing. We then come back and forth from Asteroid City the play (the final version) that we are seeing being built on set, to the theatre where it is being made. Eventually, after love, loss and affairs, an alien arrives in Asteroid City and everybody is quarantined there. I’m assuming this was shot during COVID thinking about timing but also all of the parallels and behaviours as everybody is stuck in this one place they don’t want to be, including some people in tents… The alien is brilliant, Jeff Goldblum has 2 lines but plays the Alien hilariously, probably the biggest laugh of the film was the alien’s arrival. The alien is here to collect the asteroid that gave Asteroid City it’s fame. The cast is STACKED but they don’t all get a chance to shine. I swear Frances McDormand pops up for half a minute as a background actor, but I can’t find any trace of that on the internet. Jason Schwartzman shines as Augie Steenbeck; as does Scarlett Johansson as Midge Campbell in her first Wes Anderson movie. These are chalet neighbours and their friendship and love blossoms through their windows, as does their children's love throughout. The children though, they are the stars of this movie; there’s a cheeky ginger kid who is inquisitive and hilarious with everything he delivers and asks, there’s a set of triplets who are giving The Shining but an extra one so extra weird. All of the kids and young adults deliver so much of the humour of this film, exceptionally well, and also show the most resilience and fight through the adversity (hey again COVID reference). They are also the ones who encourage the fight back, not just listening to the rules that the US Government have imposed but asking questions about why and communicating to the outside world, on this hand it turns into a North Korea style situation trying to get messages to the American press. What Wes has done beautifully is take a known scene, a little town in middle America which is borderline derelict with one happy motel owner and a garage. You know the one. It’s typically grey and bleak and there’s a tumbleweed but it’s completely subverted into this colourful world of mystery and intrigue. The set design and colour is up there with the best, if not the best of Wes’s films, it’s a masterpiece in terms of world building. It’s a weird one, you leave thinking there isn’t a huge narrative but the more you think about it, there are so many mini-stories existing within Asteroid City. Wes Anderson has just built and written this huge world where everything happens in one desert outpost. It’s a microcosm for America at that time, post-war paranoia and fear of Government interjection and monitoring. What this film lacks in huge narrative moments or outcome, it more than makes up for with ‘character’, pace and humour. It isn’t a Grand Budapest or Rushmore, with their clear on the nose narrative, but it is more than a solid addition to Wes’s discography, showing a clear progression of his work and narrative development, and worth everybody's time.