Asteroid City movie review. Wes Anderson, who has produced innovative, colorful and carnival-like films in different fields of cinema, from short films to feature films, from animation to production, has made a name for himself in American independent cinema with his filmic space, objects and characters played by famous actors, use of symmetrical frames, camera shots and black/white and color transitions.
A director who creates his unique cinema style. Anderson, who won the Grand Jury Prize for The Grand Budapest Hotel at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival and the Golden Globe Award in the Musical and Comedy categories the following year, has three films, The Royal Tenenbaums (2021), Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and Grand Budapest Hotel, for the BBC. It is listed among the 100 most important films of the century. So what makes Wes Anderson’s cinema so unique and enduring?
On the one hand, it wanders on the borders of modern cinema with its simple plot, which breaks the identification with the characters in the film, and its references to directors such as Antonioni and Jean Luc Godard. On the other hand, it oscillates between postmodern cinema, dominated by asymmetrical and symmetrical frames, a rich cast including Hollywood stars, and a chaotic and flamboyant linguistic structure. comes and continues to create its own loyal audience with its blockbuster movies.
Anderson competed with names such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Wim Wenders, Ken Loach, Aki Kaurismäki at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival with his latest film, Astreoid City. Asteroid City, like his other films, is a film that fascinates the audience beyond the expectations of classical cinema with its colorful, large cast and childish, expressionless characters, but it is not easy to understand.
Students from schools come to the Asteroid City, built in the middle of the desert, with their teachers or families, to see the crater left by an asteroid that hit the Earth thousands of years ago and to take part in a scientific competition. This fictional city called Asteroid City becomes more and more attractive, both because of the tourists who come to see the ruins left by the asteroid and those who come to participate in the competition.
The film begins with the author (Edward Norton) writing his play Asteroid City, while simultaneously setting the stage, pre-studying the actors, and an old black-and-white television show hosted by Bryan Cranston, and continues with alternating transitions between black-and-white television footage and the pastel-dominated colors of the film.
It does. Anderson does not allow the audience to understand the story, to capture the narrative integrity, or to establish identification between the characters in the movie with a large cast. The director has created a big-budget film with details in the fictional space, objects, relationships between characters, rapid back-and-forth between the past and the present, scenes in which he caricatures the American bureaucracy, and an alien that gracefully and silently lands among people and floats into the sky, picking up the crater in front of them.
In Asteroid City, for which Anderson wrote the script together with Roman Coppola, the director managed to maintain the interest of the audience in an effort to understand and get involved in the film, while Tom Hanks’ gun in his waistband, which does not match his colorful clothes, and his childish behavior, famous actors such as Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody and Jeffrey Wright.
It creates a strange feeling of incomprehension and fascination on the audience with its expressionless, monotonous speech of the actors, its intertwined story like Soviet matryoshka dolls, its complex narrative language, its colorful image composition, and its complex narrative structure, which, as an exaggerated comedy film, moves away from simple narrative patterns in which every detail is important and simple. However, it is certain that the audience coming to the Wes Anderson cinema will be lost in a meta puzzle movie, knowing that they will not be expecting a classic movie.
As a result, Asteroid City, which gave its name to the film, was built in real size and images were created symmetrically in a fictional space where each object was carefully prepared and placed, and audio and visual images of a planned American city of the 1950s, where freight trains passed in the background and nuclear atomic bomb tests were carried out. While he refers to the real world with , he also frequently pays homage to Hollywood filmmakers and films of the 1950s with his nostalgic references.
Asteroid City (2023)
Directed by: Wes Anderson
Starring: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Margot Robbie
Screenplay by: Wes Anderson
Production Design by: Adam Stockhausen
Cinematography by: Robert Yeoman
Film Editing by: Barney Pilling
Costume Design by: Milena Canonero
Set Decoration by: Kris Moran
Art Direction by: Fernando Contreras Díaz, Stéphane Cressend
Music by: Alexandre Desplat
MPAA Rating: PG-13 on appeal for brief graphic nudity, smoking and some suggestive material.
Distributed by: Focus Features (United States), Universal Pictures (international)
Release Date: May 23, 2023 (Cannes), June 16, 2023 (United States)
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