Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 105 minutes
Release Date: June 13th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Focus Features
Director(s): Wes Anderson
Writer(s): Wes Anderson / Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola (story)

You can’t wake up if you don’t fall alseep.

It’s a great opening. Bryan Cranston pops up on-screen as the host of a radio show, full frame and in black and white. He moves us on-stage to find playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) typing away on the script about to be performed, shifting us to the backdrop and wings to peer upon lofi sets and period-specific aesthetic before opening everything up to the desert in widescreen color as though giving shape to our mind’s imagination.

Instead of actors at the microphone and foley artists clanking away on random objects, we meet Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), his son Woodrow (Jake Ryan), and three daughters pulling up to the one-pump station of Asteroid City attached to a tow-truck. It’s a visual wonder shifting between form and function as well as process and artifice, begging us to ask ourselves what it will all be about.

That’s a question Augie asks himself by the tail-end of the film. Or, I guess I should say, it’s a question the fictional actor playing Augie asks by breaking the dual construct Wes Anderson has manufactured for the final time. He doesn’t receive an answer. Whether that’s because the purpose of the story he is acting out has none is up to you since we can ascribe meaning to anything if it touches us in a way that proves meaningful.

If you ask me, though, I’d say Anderson’s latest is simply another hollow piece of undeniably effective artistry that delivers unforgettable characters and ample laughs in an otherwise forgettable package. Just like The French Dispatch before it and The Grand Budapest Hotel before that. I guess his days of substantive narratives ended with Moonrise Kingdom. It’s time to accept that style has officially prevailed to render substance moot.

And that’s all well good for entertainment’s sake because there are some genuinely great moments throughout this tale of teenage scientific geniuses dragging their parents along to a giant crater to vie for a five-thousand-dollar scholarship. Woodrow and his family (rounded out by Tom Hanks as Grandpa). Dinah Campbell (Grace Edwards) and mom Midge (Scarlett Johansson). Ricky Cho (Ethan Josh Lee) and dad Roger (Steve Park). Clifford Kellogg (Aristou Meehan) and dad J.J. (Liev Schreiber). And Shelly Borden (Sophia Lillis) and mom Sandy (Hope Davis). Their projects compete more than them. Their parents bicker and/or flirt. And random side characters with zero bearing on plot (see Maya Hawke’s teacher, her ten students, and Rupert Friend’s band) pop-up now and then for a gag or two. So, why not eventually introduce an alien too?

We move between the story and the production of the story via Cranston’s constant interjections with anecdotes about the writer, actors, and director (Adrien Brody). Sometimes it’s relevant. Most times it’s fluff. You’d probably be forgiven for forgetting Jeffery Wright is there as a representative of the US government alongside a slew of familiar faces or that Tilda Swinton plays a scientist more in awe of the child geniuses than their extraterrestrial encounter.

Why? Because it’s funnier that way. To have this many characters all at once is to make it so delving into the history of any of them will only slow things to a crawl. So, Anderson wields them as color. He pulls them in for brief hijinks before going back to his de facto lead Augie, approaching the concept of a deeper emotional connection before remembering this character is emotionally stunted and thus incapable of delivering more than deadpan comedy.

Like Anderson’s previous two live action films (Isle of Dogs was even weaker), Asteroid City is a device for irreverent fun. It’s a platform to get great actors together to play in a sandbox just left of reality that really pushes the boundaries of naturalism to their limits for affected caricature. Schwartzman does well to carry things even if his journey is more or less separate from the others, rendering his Augie just one piece of a sprawling ensemble.

The kids steal the show on the performance side with a mix of Uzi and Ari Tenenbaum, Dudley, and the feral energy of the Khaki Scout Troop 55. And the production value and mise en scène combine to mesmerize on a sensory level alone. Put it all together and you get another breezy escape into Anderson’s singular quirk that ultimately makes you nostalgic for his earlier, objectively stronger work.

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(L to R) Jake Ryan as “Woodrow”, Jason Schwartzman as “Augie Steenbeck” and Tom Hanks as “Stanley Zak” in writer/director Wes Anderson’s ASTEROID CITY, a Focus Features release. Courtesy of Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features.