Movie Review: "Asteroid City" (2023)

I watched Asteroid City whilst halfway across the country for a couple of days and after a long 5-hour train journey. It was nearly night and I had to admit that I thought I would fall asleep there and then in the cinema. This was not however, because the movie was boring but honeslty because I was really just exhausted of all the travelling. From my house to the station to the hotel to the cinema and then back again, my gosh it was a bit much. So forgive me if my Asteroid City (2023) review is a little bit on-the-nose.

I adored The French Dispatch (2021) (and for your information it was because of more than just Benicio Del Toro although he was a huge part of why I adored the film). Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) is my favourite animated movie ever and honestly, I quite liked the strange quirkiness of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Asteroid City (2023) therefore felt like the next logical move as soon as it came out. Yes, I saw it on the very day it was released in the cinema.

For those of you who, like me, loved Hello Tomorrow (2023) on Apple TV+, Asteroid City was something you probably thought was going to be a 'blast' (pun intended). With its retrofuturistic atmosphere, high drama and quality ironic comedy, it almost seemed too perfect that a film about an atomic test site would be released so close to Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. But alas, Oppie proved too good and too big and basically dwarfed Anderson's movie out of existence entirely. But that doesn't explain why I left the theatre from watching Asteroid City (2023) feeling as though I had not actually watched a movie at all - it was an empty feeling.

The events of a junior stargazer competition are followed by the arrival of an alien in the form of Jeff Goldblum, there's a love story somewhere in there and a government cover-up going on at the same time, there's that weird naming game the children play whilst sitting in a circle and the leak over the telephone that happens because one kid blabbed, there's a song sung by cowboys and some schoolkid and Ethan Hawke's daughter ends up dancing along to it and then there's a suicidal tendency of a failed actress. Oh wait, don't forget Margot Robbie. After all that, there's still the off-set stuff that happens and that weird scene about falling asleep that I didn't understand. Please don't pretend it was profound - it was too long and annoying as hell. I have a headache.

Though the film's cinematography is brilliant and Wes Anderson's storytelling is always on-point every single time, this film had too much going on for me to follow or care about. There were so many characters that the only one I actually ended up really connecting with was Midge Campbell's daughter who famously says the line about how she hates her mother's face but loves her voice.

I found the story so jumbled that by the time the alien arrived on the scene I was already overwhelmed by all the random characters that were not yet doing anything. It would have helped at the beginning to have a little introduction to exactly what each one was doing instead of running through it for the second half of the movie whilst interspersing those Willem Dafoe scenes in there (yes, he's in the film too). I would have liked a small introduction like the way Guy Ritchie does it maybe - short, snappy but you get the general idea. Characters don't just turn up out of nowhere and for no reason. I mean, I don't think Wes Anderson has ever heard of being 'too much' but this movie definitely was too much.

But, here is one thing I really enjoyed about the film. The very idea that this could actually take place is so ridiculous is unreal. But Jeff Goldblum does a brilliant job of tying together all the comedy with that weird alien photograph he does. It has to be the only actual time in the movie where I quite audibly laughed - the theatre was so empty that it probably looked like that scene from Cape Fear.

All in all, I liked the fun mess of the film but I came out confused and quite bewildered. But, as everyone else does, I am looking forward to Wes Anderson's future projects.

Hey, I wrote the whole review without talking about the horrible lighting technique that basically burned my eyeballs.