Movie review: Asteroid City

Wes Anderson's 'Asteroid City'. Photo / Focus Features

Asteroid City (PG13, 115 mins) In cinemas now.

Directed by Wes Anderson

For terrific light entertainment, here’s a film about inventions, scientists, the military, bombs going off in the desert and brief romantic attachments that covers the same sort of territory as Oppenheimer but has nothing of its moodiness and definitely no deep messages. It’s basically a spoof of the cowboy genre, classrooms and science competitions … and is enjoyably shallow.

It’s 1955. Augie Steenbeek (Jason Schwartzman) with his war photographer’s camera dangling around his neck and his unlit pipe in his mouth, drives his brilliant budding scientist son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) to a stargazers’ competition in a fictitious place in the desert made famous for the landing of an asteroid 3000 years ago. Woodrow’s little sisters, played by triplets Ella, Gracie and Willan Faris are along for the ride. On arrival in Asteroid City, the family’s Mercury station-wagon breaks down, resulting in a hilarious hoist scene with Matt Dillon as a mechanic. Enter the rescuer: Augie’s rich father-in-law, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks). The stage is set.

It’s a film within a play, within a writer’s studio, skipping lightly between all three: from studio, to play, to film and back again. Cameo roles abound: Edward Norton as writer Conrad Earp, Adrian Brody as Schubert Green the half-dressed director of the play, Bryan Cranston as its host; and in the film are Tilda Swinton as a nerd astronomer, Maya Hawke as an earnest teacher, Scarlett Johansson as film star Midge Campbell, Margot Robbie as an actor playing an Elizabethan who’s also Augie’s recently dead wife in so-called real life, Geoff Goldblum as the Alien, Jeffrey Wright as a no nonsense general, Rupert Friend as a singing cowboy called Montana and many more.

It’s weird, random and often very busy. Sit back and relax, or try to. The soundtrack helps. Jarvis Cocker did some recent composing for the film and there are golden oldies too: ‘The Streets of Laredo’ and ‘Freight Train’.

Director Wes Anderson is well known for creating imagined realities. His script for ‘Asteroid City’, co-written with Roman Coppola, makes even the extremely outlandish seem unsurprising: an animated alien on a wicked mission nervously tiptoes out of a flying saucer, and when Margot Robbie’s actor tells her widower husband Augie she’s not coming back, he immediately goes off to find Midge Campbell, for whom he seems to lust. She’s in the bath, dying. But is she? It’s hard to tell if anything is real.

Black and white for the studio scenes and the play, and for the film there’s bright sunshine and colour. People tend to look a lot like 1950s Mad magazine characters. The clothes and wallpaper, cars and houses are turquoise, yellow or red. Some people stare out towards the great beyond, as if outer space offers an appealing alternative to life as we know it.

It’s stylish, fast-paced but heading nowhere and packed with beautifully composed shots. Huge fun.

Highly recommended

The first person to bring an image or hardcopy of this review to Starlight Cinema Taupō qualifies for a free ticket to ‘Asteroid City’.

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