Asteroid City (2023) *

Directed by: Wes Anderson

Starring:  Jason Schwartman, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johannson, Liev Schreiber, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Jeffrey Wright, Jake Ryan, Margot Robbie, Matt Dillon, Steve Carell

Wes Anderson movies have become as prestigious as Woody Allen's in their abilities to feature large A-List casts.  Both Anderson and Allen are self-contained and create unique worlds in which to feature their characters, but Allen hit with more consistency than Anderson and to my knowledge has never made a movie as listless as Asteroid City.   And I've seen A Rainy Day in New York. 

Where do I start?  A well-tailored narrator (Cranston) tells us of a playwright named Conrad Earp (Norton) who wrote a play titled Asteroid City.  The "action" we see takes place in a tiny Southwestern desert town (population 67) which hosts an annual science fair featuring the top science students in the country with a scholarship as a top prize.   This is actually the play itself as it is staged, and Cranston's narrator interrupts occasionally to give us behind the scenes tidbits on the play itself and its playwright.  The lead character in the play is Augie Steenback, a widowed father of three children all of which are participating in the competition.  Augie has yet to tell his children that their mother passed three weeks ago, and calls on his wealthy father-in-law Stanley (Hanks) to come to Asteroid City to pick them up when Augie's car breaks down and the family has to wait weeks for a part. 

Another key character is actress Midge Campbell (Johannson) who arrives in Asteroid City with her daughter Dinah, who acts as a possible romantic interest for Augie's oldest son Woodrow (Ryan) while Midge serves as one for the grieving Augie.  There are other storylines and characters populating Asteroid City, all of which are as muddled as the rest of the movie.   An alien spacecraft soon descends upon the town with the alien stealing the asteroid which created the enormous crater for which the town is famous.   The alien craft later reappears to return the asteroid, and in the meantime the visitors are quarantined there by the government in order to hush up the alien visit.  

I'm sure there are plot points and characters I'm overlooking, but I'm at a loss to remember those.  What I haven't overlooked is how the characters behave as if they were aliens who have inhabited these human beings and turned them into pod people.  I started to think maybe that was the twist, but I was dismayed to find Asteroid City has no reveals up its sleeve.   The screenplay contains a lot of words, but very little coherence.  The actors recite them in clipped speech patterns which are clearly upstaged by the colorful set designs.   Anderson is known for creating oddball movies overpowered by their production values, but rarely have I seen one like this in which I'm not entirely sure where all of this is going, nor did I particularly care.  I'm not certain the actors knew either, but they got to appear in a Wes Anderson movie and like the Woody Allen of old, that is an actor's rite of passage.  

Watching Asteroid City, I realized a movie exists now that made me long for Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and that's saying something.   Maybe I'm exaggerating, but if I had to choose between Asteroid City and last year's Best Picture Oscar winner, I'd have to think long and hard about it and not in a good way.