Film Review - Asteroid City (2023)

Asteroid City is the new film by Wes Anderson and takes place in a fictional desert town called Asteroid City in 1955 where Jason Schwartzman finds himself in so he can take his son (Jake Ryan) to a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet event led by General Gibson (Geoffrey Wright) but when an Alien lands one night and steals a small meteorite the town is placed into quarantine for 7 days.

Asteroid City is a film that while I’m not the worlds biggest fan of Wes Anderson I really enjoyed it but its not without problems but before I delve into those I want to talk about what I did like and firstly the production design and set design is very good here, this town looks and feels fictional yet also very real at the same time, you feel the desolation and isolation of the town yet there is also a diner, a hotel, a garage and even an observatory to monitor alien life in the universe.

Also the quarantine scenes are really good here though they will test the patience of some movie goers but I what I liked most about those scenes is that was how the dark times of the Coronavirus felt like, your locked down, everything is shut and you have to make do with the circumstances you find yourself in and the sense of drift that developed is very well realised here in those scenes.

The film also has a very game cast not just Schwartzman and Wright but also Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston (one day he’ll be playing Walter Cronkite in a movie), Edward Norton, Steve Carrell (taking over from Bill Murray who caught Covid before filming began), Jeff Goldblum and Liev Schriber as well as Tom Hanks among others and all of them are very good though sadly I didn’t love Maya Hawke who sometimes struggled to adapt to Wes Anderson’s directorial style and sounded like she was talking on fast forward at times.

And here is where I will talk about my main problem with this movie, the films structure goes back and forth between the Asteroid City scenes and the scenes of the actual play being made by Edward Norton’s character and this back and forth structure didn’t really work for me I’m sorry to say, it just felt too intrusive and I wish that we just got a bookend structure instead as those playwright stage scenes didn’t really work for me, they felt too inside the beltway and I just wanted more of the Asteroid City scenes.

All that said I really liked this movie but it won’t be for everyone but that’s Wes Anderson for you you go with it or you don’t and I’ve done both over the years, 3 and a half out of 5.