Asteroid City (12A)

Widowed war photographer Augie Steenbeck and his brood, including academically brilliant eldest son Woodrow, arrive unceremoniously in Asteroid City for a Junior Stargazers and Space Cadets convention. Woodrow and four other children are being feted at a ceremony hosted by General Grif Gibson. Shortly after a speech by quixotic scientist Dr Hickenlooper, parents, children and dignitaries witness a close encounter of the third kind connected to a fallen meteorite,

LondonNet Film Review

Asteroid City (12A) Film Review from LondonNet

Since his eye-catching 1996 debut feature Bottle Rocket, Oscar-nominated writer-director Wes Anderson has honed an instantly recognisable aesthetic that trades in gorgeous production design and costumes, snappy dialogue, stop-motion animation and gleefully eccentric characterisation. When Anderson is on fire, his weird is truly wonderful, exemplified by my two favourite pictures from his oeuvre, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Rushmore. Asteroid City nestles comfortably in the middle of his wildly creative pack alongside Moonrise Kingdom and The Darjeeling Limited…

Set in a desert town somewhere in America’s southwest, population 87, this whimsical comedy of manners unfolds as charming and impeccably framed tableaux that contemplate grief, the creation of art, celebrity and the scientific community’s long-running debate about whether we are alone in the universe (Anderson’s riposte is typically droll). An ensemble cast including blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments for Margot Robbie, Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe enlivens fanciful flourishes but a core emotional component suffers sunstroke and never fully recovers. The writer-director embellishes one of his more simplistic narratives with a waggish framing device (presented in black and white and square aspect ratio), which allows characters to blithely break the fourth wall and underline the gorgeously stylised artifice of everything on screen.

A television host (Bryan Cranston) introduces a programme dedicated to playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and the genesis of his stage work Asteroid City about a convention of young astronomers in the summer of September 1955. Behind-the-scenes shenanigans involving Earp, his cast of actors, the play’s egotistical director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody) and his wife Polly (Hong Chau) contrast with the widescreen Technicolour of a dramatisation of the play. In this lustrous fiction, widowed war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) and his brood, including academically brilliant eldest son Woodrow (Jake Ryan), arrive unceremoniously in Asteroid City for a Junior Stargazers and Space Cadets convention.

Woodrow and four other children are being feted at a ceremony hosted by General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright). Glamorous actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) attends with her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards), another honouree who piques Woodrow’s interest when she discloses, “Sometimes I feel more at home outside the Earth’s atmosphere.” Shortly after a speech by quixotic scientist Dr Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), parents, children and dignitaries witness a close encounter of the comical kind connected to a meteorite, which impacted the site almost 5000 years ago.

Asteroid City will appeal to Anderson’s ardent fanbase but like his most recent indulgence, The French Dispatch, this is brightly coloured and freshly spun candy floss: mouth-watering to the eye, sweet on the tongue but insubstantial for an average cinemagoing appetite. The writer-director’s long-running collaboration with cinematographer Robert Yeoman conjures gorgeous vistas (Spanish locations double handsomely for Cold War America). Apart from Schwartzman and Johansson’s conflicted parents, characters skedaddle from our memory almost as quickly as an extra-terrestrial interloper.

– Jo Planter