"Asteroid City" summarizes great and/or bad about a Wes Anderson film!
Allow me to elaborate...
Visually, this movie is fucking amazing! The way the cinematography zooms in…
Quick-pans...
And tracks, portrays the beautiful 50's era atmosphere,
Can 'literally' move the story forward,
and heighten a joke or a dramatic moment.
The sets & costumes are all bright, vibrant & colourful,
almost in a Technicolor fashion!
The black-and-white camerawork along with the-
for lack of a better word, "lighting" is absolutely infectious!
Along with this aspect ratio that I'd never seen before
but I just love the look of it!
Almost as if I'm watching a 50's era movie with modern-day actors.
Alexandre Desplat's 50's era score is once again
groovy and some of the best music that he's put in an Anderson film!
And as always, the framing is so symmetrical...
That shots of multiple actors are staged to look like triangles!
Anderson and longtime collaborator, Roman Coppola once again craft an unapologetically
fucking weird script filled with quirky, deadpan characters who either rarely remote,
or express only one singular emotion.
And yet Anderson directs an incredibly talented A-list ensemble of actors
who somehow make me smile and chuckle even when the joke or dramatic moment doesn't land.
And what I mean by that is, it felt like watching a Frasier episode where characters speak
the most pretentious, psuedo-intellectual bullshit you have no idea what it means,
but you don't care whatsoever because the timing and delivery
of the actors makes you believe that these are genuine people and that they somehow manage to communicate
so many different emotions with one tone of voice and limited facial expressions.
It helps that like most of Anderson's scripts, the characters are all facing the same dilemma;
they're each either struggling with, or denying the painful truths of the situation within their lives-
whether they're mourning in grief,
or they're unsure of what their main objective is in their life.
And that's just BEFORE they experience an alien encounter together-
that makes them question their lives even further; what is true or what isn't? What is the meaning of life?
Is there one to begin with?
And eventually, they're all forced to choose whether or not to let someone dictate what truth is,
what their meaning in life is, or to forge their own path and decide these things for themselves...
Things that I think we can all agree...
have been PAINFULLY relevant in the past few years...
Like most of Anderson's recent movies, the script is BEYOND overstuffed with too many characters!
Several of whom are played by actors so desperate to work with him that they'll literally stand in the background,
serving absolutely no damn purpose!
Audiences-old and new can definitely be alienated by the fact that this is mainly
a slice-of-life filler movie focused more on character interactions than plot.
And the fact that this is essentially about a group of people who are quarantined,
Are being told by the government what they're seeing isn't true and are torn between what is and what isn't...
You know-things that... honest to God people will just fucking not wake up to realize-
There's LITERALLY a line in this movie that says "You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep"!
People who haven't question anything in the past few years-
GET IT THRU YOUR FUCKING SKULL-
What I'm trying to say is...
The plot can definitely raise... ''mixed emotions"!
But the worst par of all this is that there are way too meta-jokes that really overshadow the main plot,
making it overly confusing, and...
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the meta-subplot in black-and-white just because
visually, it was amazing to watch on the big screen and several of the actors in it gave some of the best performances in the entire movie.
But even I can admit that telling a story within the original story, about the original story...
Do you see where I'm going with on this?!
My best way of describing who can, or can't enjoy this movie;
If you were a fan of Wes Anderson's older works but have gotten sick of his style, or were just never in it to begin with,
this won't do you any favours.
But if you're like me, and feel that's he grown as a filmmaker throughout the years-
especially after "Moonrise Kingdom" onwards,
I'd say; give it a watch and decide for yourself
whether it's good or not.
That's the only truth you can make about this damn movie...