Review: In 'Asteroid City,' Wes Anderson stages an alien invasion as only Wes Anderson can
The star-studded cast includes, from left, Steve Carell, Aristou Meehan and Liev Schreiber.will likely only reinforce his detractors’ animus toward the filmmaker’s elaborate but undeniably insular world-building, but admirers — and I’m among them — will delight in the dizzying variations he works on signature themes and tropes.
In most of his previous films, Anderson used a variety of devices — narrators, chapter breaks, curtains, faux books — to foreground the constructed nature of his stories.
The play is set in the titular Asteroid City, a tiny burg in the Southwest that owes its modest existence to the ancient crater formed by the impact of the Arid Plains meteorite. The town, whose tight cluster of buildings includes an observatory presided over by Dr. Hickenlooper , hosts the annual Junior Stargazer Convention and Asteroid Day to celebrate the scientific achievements of several gifted teens.
The gathering of this diverse tribe, already enlivened by Midge’s glamorous presence, becomes even more eventful when a spacecraft suddenly appears during a group viewing of “astronomical ellipses” . As the stunned crowd gapes, a lanky stop-motion alien descends from the ship, plucks the meteorite from its resting place and unexpectedly spirits it into the sky.
If this summary seems unduly windy, be assured that it barely hints at the story’s many convolutions . But plot, despite its superabundance here, isn’t really Anderson’s focus: Asteroid City is far more a witty meditation on theater and acting than a comic riff on Cold War paranoia, government secrecy and coercion, or the military-industrial complex’s cooptation of scientific discovery .
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