Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Wes Anderson
Starring: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda
Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope
Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon,
Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, Jeff
Goldblum
There are certain guarantees with a new Wes Anderson movie. You
know it's going to look better than 99% of the other new movies you'll
see in a given year, and you know it will feature an ensemble cast
stacked with A-list stars working for scale in between superhero movies
and under-rated character actors granted as much screen time as their
more recognisable aforementioned counterparts. There's no guarantee
however that a new Anderson movie is going to offer a compelling
narrative or interesting characters for all those celebs to play. Such
is the case with Asteroid City, a stunningly gorgeous film that stars, well…everyone, but which has
little interest in the likes of story, plot and character.
If Anderson's previous movie,
The French Dispatch, was a love letter to a time when America took journalism seriously,
Asteroid City opens in a manner that suggests it's set to
do something similar for the lost golden age of American television
drama. We're greeted by Bryan Cranston playing the sort of
self-serious host who feels it's his duty to educate the American masses
huddled around their goggleboxes on the serious art form of television
drama. It's 1955, a time when every writer was happy to work in a medium
that hadn't yet developed a reputation as chewing gum for the senses.
One such writer is Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), the playwright
behind the subsequent drama within the drama.
Said drama (although drama is a strong word for this listless
spectacle) revolves around a convention for teenage scientists being
held in the titular Asteroid City, a small town in the middle of the
Nevada desert where a piece of space debris landed several thousand
years ago. Little do the guests know that they're set to be quarantined
in the town following the arrival of an alien (which appears as if it's
stop-motion animated yet is credited as being performed by
Jeff Goldblum).
That's a cracking premise. Trouble is, it's not a Wes Anderson premise.
It's a 1980s Joe Dante premise. You can imagine the fun Dante would have
this setup, giving us a bunch of quirky characters while paying homage
to the atomic age b-movies of his youth. The characters that inhabit
Asteroid City look slightly quirky, but they're all surprisingly bland.
The closest the film has to a traditional drama is an unlikely
burgeoning romance between a war photographer (Jason Schwartzman)
and a self-obsessed movie star (Scarlett Johansson). It doesn't
go anywhere of note, nor does a similar flirtation between a young
schoolteacher (Maya Hawke) and a singing cowboy (Rupert Friend). Other characters wander in and out in the starry form of
Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Margot
Robbie, Liev Schrieber, Hope Davis
and Willem Dafoe, to name but a few, with most of them getting
about as much screen time as a Hitchcock cameo. You can't help but
wonder if Anderson is constantly being pestered by actors to write them
a role and decided to get them all out of the way in a single movie. The
poor bloke probably just wants to make movies with Schwartzman but has
the agent of every A-lister constantly leaving him voicemails.
Every now and then we'll leave the main narrative to return to the
backstage drama, which just comes off as filler. Seeing Norton's
playwright audition Schwartzman as the actor set to play the character
within Asteroid City, or Brody as a director in the midst of a divorce
adds nothing. The setting of Asteroid City is known for a large crater
left by that rock that fell from the skies all those millennia ago, and
the film has a similarly massive hole where the drama should be. It's
ironic that Anderson chooses to evoke mid-century American drama, which
was known for its resolute commitment to narrative and character, two
elements sorely lacking here.
Of course, it looks incredible, with miniatures and sets that recall
the creations of another Anderson, British kids' TV legend Gerry.
Anderson seems a little too in love with his sets, with the camera
constantly panning and tracking through them as if to make sure we
realise just how much craft has gone into their construction. At times
the camera moves through the world in a way that seems inspired by those
Lucasarts video games from the late '80s and early '90s (Zak McKracken
and the Alien Mindbenders was a childhood fave of this writer), and the
lack of narrative thrust gives the act of watching
Asteroid City the appearance of watching someone explore
the setting of an elaborate video game while ignoring the actual
gameplay. Yes, it's a lovingly detailed world but can we get back to the
mission?
