REVIEW:
Perhaps the most self-indulgent West Anderson movie ever made, Asteroid City is intentionally weird and doesn’t care. Now, to be fair, all of Wes Anderson’s movies are weird, and that’s his thing. That’s what makes his movie so unique and funny. Think about his better movies. Rushmore. The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom. He’s a quirky guy. But Asteroid City isn’t quirky. It’s annoying. For starters, there really isn’t much of a story here. A bunch of random characters all find themselves visiting the same city at the same time.
The cast is star studded, just like all of Anderson’s movies, although this has got to be his most A list cast yet, with the likes of both Tom Hanks and Scarlet Johansen on board. None of that helps, however, since each is given very little to do. Hanks plays the father in law to a man who just lost his wife. The problem is that whatever jokes there are that you would think could have whole stories behind them (Hanks not liking his son in law, Jason Schwartzman, and fully admitting that to Schwartzman’s face, Schwartzman not telling his kids that their mother died for three weeks,) are handled at rapid fire, breakneck speed, to the point where they aren’t stories… they are just quick jokes and then moving on situations.
With none of the characters being interesting or likable, by the time something interesting happens involving aliens, it’s too little too late And then the movie doesn’t handle that right anyway, treating it with about as much believability and realism as the aliens in Mars Attacks. There was potential here. That moments between Hanks and Schwartzman early on, when Hanks admits to not liking his son in law, was reminiscent of some of the best Anderson movies and characters (Bill Murray – who hated his two sons in Rushmore, Gene Hackman – who openly talked poorly about his kids in Tenenbaums,) but it’s one and done here. And maybe that’s because there are too many characters and to much to try to get to. At times this movie feels like the Robert Altman film Nashville, loaded with characters, but not much story. And regarding the self-indulging comment that began this review, just look at the color palette. Never has Anderson been so extreme. Add that with the fact that this movie tries to be about a actors in a play portraying what we are watching on screen, (so it tries to be meta,) and you have a bit of a mess.