Starring Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Steve Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, and Jeff Goldblum.

Directed by Wes Anderson

Universal, out now

Welcome to Asteroid City…

Wes Anderson is a love him or hate him kind of director. His framing devices (largely static with individuals often reduced to talking heads) are a strange combination of cartoonish and intensely reminiscent of panels from a graphic novel.

In truth, I wonder if he might be more at home in such settings and as Isle of Dogs and Fantastic Mr Fox demonstrate, perhaps he is.

The odd Claymation style of direction he provides to his actors is uniquely Anderson though and has been present all the way from The Royal Tenenbaums through to Asteroid City. It’s what makes his films so instantly recognisable.

The colours are always sumptuous, the contrast high, the shots crisp, drenched and stimulating. Whatever he’s doing, Anderson’s films are delightful to watch. If films were in art galleries, Anderson would be in the pop art section but situated between Edward Hopper and Jeff Koons; saturation hiding a deeper meaning.

And, as with all his films, it’s not immediately obvious what the stories are about.

We have the familiar presence of fathers whose wives are absent for one reason or another. We have strange non-conforming women sliding by with their own concerns but, somehow, sexualised in a way the fathers aren’t (and definitely seen from the point of view of those same fathers). We have precocious children outshining their responsible adults who have, one feels, become ensnared by the very act of being adults.

Most of the children here are adults in smaller bodies – just as smart, just as awkward and just as strange.

There is much to admire as a result – not least Anderson’s determination to treat young people as actual people with their own agency.

You might consider much of this as Anderson’s attempt to figure himself out and it feels quite personal in that sense. In many of his films you might mistake the young characters for Anderson and the older, bumbling adults as those people he grew up around.

Which is all fine but hardly what constitutes a review.

Asteroid City is interesting and, I think, largely concerned with the idea that the world carries on without us, picking us up, moving us along and depositing us as it will while all around us, every single other particle of existence is subject to the same pattern of being.

Try as we might, no matter what we invent, no matter what forms of control we exert and ties we make, life goes on without much regard for what we’re trying to achieve and will brusquely wave aside our attempts to control it. Our meaning is what we make of it – because nothing is going to come from outside except confusion.

It shares these themes with The Royal Tenenbaums as much as it does with Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion.

It is at times funny, winsome, cute and caring but beneath all of this is a melancholia for the world as it finds us; for the fact we live according to its whims. Everything skating on the surface is the life we make while we try to deal with the truth of our situations.

The structure of Asteroid City is told with a layered ‘theatrical’ production motif that reminded me of the coda for Jordan Peele’s Nope. The first three minutes tells us everything about the film – what it means, what we’re going to encounter and, importantly, its structure. These moments, which are then additionally interspersed throughout the film, are in black and white and it felt to me as if this choice was meant to invoke in the viewer a sense of the real in a way the saturated colours of Asteroid City itself undermine the idea of reality being anything more than confectionary wating to be consumed.

If the fully coloured sections are comic book in nature then the black and white sections are what is really happening, what we should be paying attention to. The meaning is to be found here if anywhere even as these segments point at their derivative – the play called Asteroid City.

Asteroid City is a play about moments that can arrest us, how we might choose to respond to them and that, to quote one character, ‘it’s always the wrong time.’

The parentheses surrounding these acts in the movie are the parent talking to the child, reminding them that everything is contingent and we better get used to it because who knows what the big playwright might choose to do with us in the next scene.

Verdict: I think this is better than The French Dispatch but it doesn’t quite scale the heights of The Grand Budapest Hotel but structurally it’s much closer to the former film. If you have any interest in cinema and, in particular, Anderson, this should snag your attention.

Rating? 8 meteorites out of 10.

Stewart Hotston