Asteroid City proves there’s no way to copy Wes Anderson

This review of Asteroid City comes from the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Expect more about the movie as we get closer to the movie’s June theatrical opening.

Movie buffs have never been in danger of mistaking a Wes Anderson movie for someone else’s work, but he’s only gotten more distinctive as he’s aged. A storyteller as well as a visual stylist, Anderson produces hyper-decorative, deceptively gripping work that is instantly recognisable. It’s also eye-pleasing enough to have been turned off fashion trends, book photographyhit Instagram accountsand a recent wave of AI-generated art and lifestyle TikTok parodies providing definitive proof that there is a huge disconnect between artistry and algorithm. But even with its trademark two visual style turned into one ubiquitous part of popular culture, Asteroid City proves there’s still no one like Wes Anderson.

Anderson has been making grand, jubilant, painful, profound films for decades, but he has moved away from the naturalistic, heart-to-heart sensibility of Bottle Rocket, RushmoreAnd The Royal Tenenbaums. He is on his way to the next level as a filmmaker by focusing on visually lavish imaginings. His latest films – of the Matryoshka doll nestled Neo-Baroque architecture of The big hotel in Budapest to the sparkling jeu d’esprit of The French shipping — move from the modern age to the bygone era and add an extravagant, disarmingly sincere abundance of visual detail.

Asteroid City, his eleventh feature, is as dazzlingly ambitious as those films in his recreation of the mid-century American Southwest, circa 1955. The desert city of Asteroid City is named after a massive meteor crater and a nearby celestial observatory. It’s a small outpost of civilization (population 87) set against the sun-drenched terrain and turquoise skies of the surrounding countryside.

A lunchroom with 12 stools, a gas station with one pump, a hotel with 10 cabins and a payphone make up most of the local attractions. Mushroom clouds loom in the distance, a somber reminder of the nuclear paranoia of the time. Broken station wagons and an unfinished turnoff to the more bustling settlement once planned for the area. But now most of the traffic – including a government train carrying Pontiacs, pecans and nuclear warheads – continues as normal.

Asteroid City won’t open in this desert town. It begins on a black and white studio set, where a Rod Serling-esque host (Break bad‘s Bryan Cranston) frames the entire film as a play that has never been performed, presented by a troupe of New York stage actors, including Tennessee Williams border playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and his leads, Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman) and Mercedes Ford (Scarlett Johansson). “Asteroid City does not exist,” says the host. “It is an imaginary drama created especially for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication.”

Establishing the American West and New York’s legendary Actors Studio as the corners of mythological Americana hovering just outside the action, Anderson blasts back to the desert with a roadrunner’s cheek peeking along through the frame. As the boxy aspect ratio of the frame segment opens into dazzling widescreen, the key players — including four teenage prodigies and their families — gather for the 1955 Junior Stargazer Competition, which will be judged by a five-star military general (Jeffrey Wright) and an acclaimed, aloof astronomer (Tilda Swinton, though that might go without saying).

For Augie Steenbeck (Schwartzman), a war photographer still grieving for his late wife, it’s a challenge to pack his three daughters and bright son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) into a wood-walled Mercury Monterey and head out into the desert – mainly because he didn’t. already told the children about their mother’s death. “Time is never right,” he tells his father-in-law (Tom Hanks), who responds in kind, “Time is always wrong.”

Movie star Midge Campbell (Johansson), meanwhile, is rehearsing for a new role – one of the “tragic, abused alcoholics” she’s known for playing – as she accompanies her stargazer daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) to Asteroid City. Midge checks into the cabin opposite Augie and they settle into a warm repartee. Elsewhere in town, a teacher (Maya Hawke) struggles to get her young students together while a handsome cowpoke (Rupert Friend) watches her. And the motel owner (Steve Carell) geniusly acknowledges every complaint his guests receive.

Anderson’s ensemble casts are as synonymous with his style as any of his visual trademarks at this point, and every actor here is in step with his eccentric dialogue. Schwartzman, a regular on Anderson films since the Rushmore days, comes into the spotlight with Asteroid City, and he nails that sly, quintessentially Andersonian mix of humor and melancholy. The script (written by Anderson, with filmmaker Roman Coppola co-credited for the story) is among his most gripping and pointillist-precise work.

As the Stargazer convention begins and is disrupted and delayed, Anderson strikes a balance between the central desert action and the dramatic challenges the New York theater company faces in portraying it accurately. Jones finds Augie’s grief unfathomable and wonders aloud, “Am I doing him right?” But that feeling of being lost in the part is part of what brings him closer to something resembling the truth.

Anderson’s ingenious framing device, in which actors play actors playing actors, pits all these characters against each other in a way that Asteroid City, making it slightly richer than the perfectly lovable desert charmer the trailers convey. Anderson focuses on the great cosmic mysteries of existence – some in space, some on Earth, and based on human emotion. His recent films have made it clear that he is a richly philosophical filmmaker and that he enjoys studying his artistic pursuits from a distance – through the fog of memory in The big hotel in Budapestand by making storytelling itself a subject in The French shipping.

Anderson’s signature pastel palette, obsessively symmetrical compositions and swirling artifice open up entire worlds in miniature. His carefully designed and constructed film dioramas often bridge the gap between cinema, theater and other visual art forms, such as the ‘living photosthat preceded radio. During their years working together, he and cinematographer Robert Yeoman have rewritten the rules of the fast tracking shot: it’s hard to think of another filmmaker who pans and tilts the camera with his level of sophistication and deadpan humor.

Anderson’s films are just as distinctive in their emotional thrust. The characters are fantastic, but their appeal to escapism and adventure is deeply felt, and it comes with a strong sense of whimsical wonder. His exotic locations make his stories resemble familiar, distant dreams. Nostalgia is key Asteroid City just as good as in his earlier films, even if the imaginative design is so much more imaginative than the actual history.

Anderson continues to progress rapidly as a filmmaker, making his worlds become exaggerated and artificial with each new project, while gently inviting his audience to accept the universality of his characters’ emotions. Of Asteroid City, he brings something essential about the role of artistic creation and re-creation, of art itself – especially in the way it helps people process trauma and the unexpected. According to him, art makes us understand what we can do, and accept what we can’t. It’s nice on the surface, but it’s also a layered existential poem. It’s Wes Anderson at his most mature and magical – and at his most unique, in a way no one else can capture – especially not AI.

Asteroid City will open in limited theatrical release in America on June 16 and in wide release on June 23.