Asteroid City had almost all the ingredients for being a great movie. It had a brilliant star studded cast. It had amazing sets. It had brilliant cinematography. It had an interesting writer and director who had made hits before. However, it was missing the most important ingredient of them all – a story.
I could fill my entire website with the long list of amazing actors that featured in this film. Bryan Cranston, Ed Norton, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Carell, Willem Dafoe, Tom Hanks, Jason Schwartzman, Margot Robbie and many more. All have done brilliant films in the past and their acting was great. This movie had some fun and interesting scenes. However, an actor can only do so much without a purpose.
The writer and director is the great Wes Anderson. I’ve only seen The Grand Budapest Hotel, Mr. Fantastic Fox and Isle of Dogs, which are probably his most famous films and I thoroughly enjoyed. I’ve since been warned that his other films are just as lost and confusing as Asteroid City so I’m hesitant to whether I should check them out.
From what I have seen, Wes Anderson has beautiful cinematography and one of the best set designs to date. Every scene is filled with intricate details and could be framed in a brilliant art gallery. Symmetry, color, aspect ratio and framing are minor details that he combines to glorify the relatively mundane. Asteroid City is no exception and the entire movie looked visually excellent.
So where did it all go wrong? I waited and waited for this movie to reveal a proper plot, and it just never arrived. They have a random alien encounter about an hour into the film, and it was really just a trick to keep the audience watching. We all said “oh the first hour must have just been a long introduction to characters and now we are going to get a real movie”. I wish that was the case, but the movie almost immediately reverts back to pointless scenes that don’t connect.
We are essentially watching two movies at once: one about the creation of the play and one about the play itself. The contrast between the two is so disjointed though and I began to lose track of each. These stories finally connect at the very end of the film, and it really had no pay off. Maybe they could have had them connect earlier in the film and we get to see the characters coping with the other story – I still don’t think this would have worked but it would have been better than what we got.
The ending had the main character questioning what he was even doing. And he was told don’t worry about having answers, we just exist and must keep existing. It was an obvious nod to an audience about how plot doesn’t really matter and we should just enjoy the ambiguous nature of it all.
Having self – awareness or being self – deprecating isn’t an excuse. People so often bring up their own flaws as a defense against criticism. Asteroid City essentially wears the zero rationale criticism like a badge of honor. This is so when the audience says it was a garbage plot, they can say “you just don’t understand that it’s meant to be a garbage plot”.
Wes Anderson and most of this cast are smug. They have abandoned the idea of even using a plot to just bask in their own directing and acting abilities. They forgot that casting, set design and cinematography are meant to lift up a story, not ignore it. It’s such a backwards way of thinking and didn’t work at all.
