YNOT at the Movies

If you want to create humorous vintage greeting cards, you will be delighted to find plenty of inspirations in the auteur Wes Anderson's latest film "Asteroid City" (USA 2023 | 104 min.). In this head-scratching film, its nifty visual bears the director's signature in every frame and composition, but its story is dull and humdrum. He impressively assembles a large troop of well-known actors, but none of the peculiar characters that they play stands out.

To give the audience a jump start with these characters, the film begins by telling us some of them which are also featured in a three-act play that is written on a typewriter by Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). The story is set in 1955 in an imaginary city called Asteroid City, sitting in the middle of a desert decorated by red rocks and cactus like those in Sedona, Arizona. The city makes money through tourism by exhibiting a fist-sized meteorite, besides a meteoric crater nearby, as well as a US government observatory.

Newly widowed war-photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) is stuck in Asteroid City with his four kids due to a car problem. He calls his cranky father-in-law Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks) for help. He apparently shows little grief about his late wife, but he is more interested in the movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johannsson) whose window conveniently faces his for ongoing conversations. Midge comes to this city with her daughter for the Junior Stargazer convention, which draws a bus-load of children and parents to celebrate the scientific achievements of youth.

In the middle of the convention, an alien comes down from a spaceship and takes away the City's meteorite that is on display. The US government wants to investigate the incident and invokes a military lockdown of the city and puts everyone at the convention into a quarantine. As if this far-fetched plot is not eccentric enough, the film blends its storytelling with the stage version of this story in black and white, and it also changes its aspect ratio, a typical trick used by the director.

If you are a fan of the director Wes Anderson's work, you probably care less about the plot, but will marvel at his signature filmmaking and enjoy his subtle sense of humor. The mesmerizing visual overpowers everything else in the film, including the story the film wants to tell, which doesn't add much to the film despite its complexity. As if the director is trying to convince himself, he lets one of the characters say it loudly: "just keep telling the story."

To add to his unique style, Wes Anderson directs almost all the characters in the film to speak in flat mono tone without punctuation and intonation, and often speak really fast. That makes these already one-dimensional characters even more like a bunch of colorful lifeless toys from the same toy factory.

This movie is like an alien itself—it arrives with a distinct and stylish visual, but it's hard for us to comprehend its purpose and message, if it has one. However, it is nevertheless irresistible to look at it.

"Asteroid City" opens in the San Francisco Bay Area on Friday, June 23, 2023.