✯✯✯✯½

Few present-day filmmakers quickly make themselves into a household name in the same way that Wes Anderson does. Every new project of his carries the distinct style that we’ve known him for over the years, and sometimes that becomes the very thing that we expect from whatever he comes up with next. Asteroid City feels like the perfect amalgamation of what exactly we hope to see from him as he takes on a more overt genre concept – in this case, a science fiction film – but he goes to show how his idiosyncrasies go far beyond the look. If anything, it’s Wes Anderson making a film in response to people who think his style applies only to the visual approach, and maybe his best in quite some time.

Two stories unfold in Asteroid City: one involving a television broadcast of a play that also happens to be named “Asteroid City.” This broadcast is shown to us in black-and-white with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. As we’re watching the story within the play itself, which makes up the bulk of the film’s narrative, it switches to a colour palette resembling Technicolor productions of the classic Hollywood era with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. This story introduces us to a war photographer named Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), who heads to Asteroid City together with his children so his son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) can receive a Junior Stargazer award for an astronomy convention. All seems well, as more people start showing up, and then end up witnessing an extraterrestrial event which puts the city under quarantine.

It’s one thing for Wes Anderson to use the framing device to make room for his usual idiosyncracies, but the fracturing of both narratives makes clear how this is a film that captures the feeling of a selective memory surrounding what supposedly happened in a city that only a handful of people remember. But I think that where Wes Anderson is making a film that’s so clearly built on the artifice that we tend to associate with his style of filmmaking to tell such a story only results in Asteroid City feeling like an existential crisis. It delivers this exact feeling in the sense that Wes Anderson knows he’s working within exactly what people expect from him, but even he knows that there’s only so much time for him to keep doing exactly this.

For many fans of Wes Anderson’s work, it retains the same sense of humour that we can always say we loved him for over the years. Being his funniest film since The Grand Budapest Hotel, I find that the successes of Asteroid City come in thanks to how Anderson mixes these moments in order to create a more cohesive work about how art is informed by the troubled aspects of what we go through in life, and functions as a mechanism for coping with the times. I think for one, it’s rather beautiful that someone like Wes Anderson can find humour even in this situation, but it also shows that Anderson is someone who gets that it’s a human instinct to laugh even in the face of a tragedy.

But even the whole concept of an alien landing, in the eyes of someone like Wes Anderson, can only be pulled off in a manner that’s as hysterical as ever. All this starts with how the people upon witnessing the alien’s arrival are suddenly placed under quarantine – then they’re made to find a sense of bonding with people who they seemed to have nothing in common with in the moment. Because of this, the artifice of what many associate with Wes Anderson’s usual quirks starts to make room for what might show how Anderson still has a perfect understanding of how humans stick together when circumstances are too much for others to handle.

There’s not much to Asteroid City that might be immediate in converting naysayers to Anderson work. But for longtime fans of his, it’ll definitely present a new depth to his storytelling. I think this might be the best that he’s been in quite a while, because it feels like we’ve come to a point where Wes Anderson knows exactly what his audience will expect – and he delivers something that brings both that and a lot more. For what it’s worth, this might be Wes Anderson at his saddest since The Royal Tenenbaums. And I think that it might be a sign that he’s allowed himself to grow along with his work.

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Watch the trailer right here.

All images via Focus Features.

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Directed by Wes Anderson
Screenplay by Wes Anderson
Produced by Wes Anderson, Steven Rales, Jeremy Dawson
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
Running Time: 105 minutes
Release Date: June 16, 2023