Asteroid City review: Wes Anderson's new star-studded offering crashes

Asteroid City review: Wes Anderson's new star-studded offering crashes

 

Review of the new Wes Anderson film: Asteroid City, starring Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jason Schwartzman, Bryan Cranston and Adrien Brody, among others.

Wes Anderson is one of those one-of-a-kind creators: his particular style is recognizable at first glance because it has an unmistakable author's stamp and his filmography has wonderful films to revisit over and over again.

Unfortunately, Asteroid City is not among them for various reasons that we are going to unravel in this text and it will not be for lack of resources, because in addition to having an amazing production design, it has a cast full of stars at its disposal.

The film, by the way, was shot in strict secrecy in Chinchón, but don't expect to recognize any location because the landscape has been redrawn to move us to an arid plain in the United States in the mid-50s.

 

What is the film about?

It is not easy to answer this question even after having seen it. Asteroid City has a lot of metalanguage, as was the case with The French Chronicle . If in that film Anderson sought to capture in images what a publication was like and write a love letter to journalism, here he does the same with the photography of the "golden age of advertising".

But it doesn't stop there, it also pays homage to the ins and outs of theater and its link to some television shows like The Twilight Zone .

Asteroid City is the name of a small town, usually quite lonely, where a handful of applicants for a local award will gather. They are a gang of young misfits but scholars who will face an unexpected event that will leave them speechless and that will result in a period of mandatory quarantine imposed by the government.

This will mean that a good number of people who have nothing in common will have to live in the place, famous for being the site where a meteorite struck 5,000 years ago.

 

The many planes of reality

One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the fact that it is constantly playing with what we see and what happens behind the scenes. It is as if we were interspersed with the process of creation, representation and a documentary that narrates how history was made.

We see models of the elements of the mise-en-scène, a recreation of the way the screenwriter wrote the story, and it is often said that they don't understand why certain things happen... what did he mean by what he wrote.

The idea, although not entirely original, is good. The problem comes from the structure: the division into acts that "cut" the action becomes very heavy and the soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat does not help to lighten the footage at all. It may be one of his least interesting works, in fact, because it has repetitive and tiresome themes.

 

The characters-setting

Much more interesting is the treatment of photography, which, as we said, refers us to the billboards of the mid-50s where the signing of Scarlett Johansson could not be more appropriate, giving life to a diva obsessed with the verisimilitude of her interpretations.

The staging could not be richer and more interesting, with shots packed with elements that enrich the settings, but the big question is, where does all this lead us? What story does the film want to tell us?

The characters themselves, among which we find a well-assorted group of first-rate performers such as Tom Hanks, Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Margot Robbie, Rupert Friend, Jeffrey Wright, Maya Hawke or Liev Schreiber, to name a few. A handful of them seem more like elements of the set than figures written with three-dimensionality with which to empathize.

The filmmaker's particular sense of humor appears from time to time but the tedium is such that it barely arouses a smile.

So, all in all, Asteroid City is one of those movies that will probably only wow the most die-hard Wes Anderson fans and viewers who prioritize sensory experience over story. How can a movie that has nuclear explosions, atomic weapons and even an alien be so boring?