Wes Anderson (The French Dispatch) had a city in the desert, including cacti and mountains, built for his new film Asteroid City. The result impresses with enormously complex sets. Unlike some other films by the cult director, they don’t obstruct the view of the characters. One of them is played by the amazing Scarlett Johansson. The retro science fiction film can be seen in German cinemas as of today.
Asteroid City takes you to the idyll between atomic bomb tests and alien visits
Asteroid City consists of several narrative levels, as one is used to from director and writer Anderson. The outermost narrative ring is a black-and-white TV show whose host looks suspiciously like Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston. This show chronicles the making of a fictional author’s (Edward Norton) play Asteroid City, from the writing process to the casting and the premiere.
Universal
Asteroid City
Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman plays the actor who gets the male lead (or is he playing an actor who plays an actor who gets the lead?), we see him backstage and onstage.
But we see him too in Asteroid City, the picturesque 87 soul place on whose horizon atomic bomb tests are carried out in 1955. In this colorful movie-within-a-play-within-a-show, family man and widower Augie (Schwartzman) meets actress Midge (Scarlett Johansson), while Anderson quirky residents, extraterrestrial day visitors and way too clever kids arranged around it.
For this intricate story, Anderson once again assembled a voluminous cast including Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, Hong Chau, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton and Margot Robbie.
The retro sci-fi film is a feast for the eyes
The film is equipped with the usual Deadpan humor and a wealth of design details that rarely let the eye rest. The town of Asteroid City, recreated in a Spanish desert, is a feast for the eyes even by Anderson standards, which with its delightful artificiality is reminiscent of genre classics of the 50s, in which at best the aquamarine sky was real and often not even that.
Those sensitive to Anderson’s extreme artificiality will be exposed to an atomic bomb of allergens in his new film, the camera moves so rigidly, the scenes appear so stony, every movement and every sound is so composed.
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This approach creates an effect that the many new AI parodies of Anderson’s style ignore. The fake rocks and unnatural tone of voice amplify the microscopic emotional upheavals among the people in this film until they’re unmissable and tangible.
Scarlett Johansson proves once again why she’s perfect for sci-fi stuff
The distant flirtations of Scarlett Johansson’s actress and Jason Schwartzman’s widower, both struggling with the shadows of their past, creep into the heart step by step. Johansson seems born for Wes Anderson’s cast of figures, bringing both an aura of classic Hollywood grandeur and a compelling modernity she has lent to sci-fi films from The Island to Her, Under the Skin, Lucy and Ghost in the Shell predestined. One takes the people (or the alien) of the future from her, because she seems to have fallen out of our time.
Almost imperceptibly, Asteroid City is Anderson’s best film since Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). At that time, the director mourned the loss of an old world that was lost to fascism. This time he travels back to Cold War America, frozen by backwardness and paranoia.
3000 years ago a celestial body hit there, the crater of which is now sold as a tourist attraction. Everyone looks into this dusty hole and into their own personal craters and tragedies. The future and progress are only a glimpse into the stars away.
Asteroid City has been in German cinemas since June 15th.