#MovieReview: Asteroid City and the trouble with human connection

This review includes mild spoilers

Asteroid City is as intricately charming as any Wes Anderson film yet and is a casual rebuke of the AI-generated imitations of his style.

Anderson is modern cinema’s most distinctive filmmaker and you will be able to tell you are in one of his universes within seconds of flicking channels.

It is easy to write off this style as an empty bag of tricks, which has seen thousands of social media imitations over the past year, but Anderson is back to prove its purpose.

Asteroid City is perhaps the most ‘Wes Anderson’ of all of his films to date, with beautifully rendered dioramas, vaguely mid-Atlantic bourgeois characters and a framing device three layers deep.

The in-film Asteroid City story is a play, shown to the audience by way of a behind-the-scenes television show, all packaged in a film.

It may appear needlessly convoluted to a first time viewer, but there’s method to the miniature world madness.

As is often the case for Anderson, communication (or lack thereof) is the central theme in this movie.

His oddly specific characters speak to each other in curt clipped language that says more by omission than in words, and yet they still long for connection.

At one point, buttoned up researcher Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) offhandedly remarks, “I never had children, but sometimes I wonder if I wish I should have,” saying more about her character than an hour of dialogue ever could.

It is but one of an endless list of quotable lines delivered in dry, near-emotionless tones by a packed cast of world-class actors.

And following an inexplicable event at the mid-point of this film, the entirety of this tiny sandswept frontier town is forced to enter a military quarantine.

There are, of course, clear parallels to be drawn with Covid-19 and how it affected human communication.

In this odd desert oasis, characters have no choice but to connect or they will be driven mad by isolation as they ponder what the supernatural event might mean for their place in the universe.

And that is what Anderson grapples with throughout, wrapping his thoughts about the world in three layers of meta narrative to both hammer home his feelings and distance himself from them.

But Asteroid City is not some arthouse think-piece; it is engaging, funny and Anderson’s best work since The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

Expect to leave with a few existential questions of your own, however.

Rated 13 for some scenes of Language, Nudity and Violence.
4.5/5.

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