Asteroid City (2023)
a review by Evan Landon
“You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep...”
I do enjoy Wes Anderson flicks. I really do. They have an artistic quality that is almost so synonymous, it should be it's own word; like “Orwellian” or “Kubrickian”... “Andersonian”? By the way, why haven't we had a Wes Anderson & Nicolas Cage team up?! Holy shit, that would write itself!
That being said, I am not entirely sure where that this would line up in my favorite Wes Anderson flicks. Maybe I will make that list someday, but that's not why I am writing this review. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure why I write reviews, but it is something I do anyways.
I kind of hesitated putting this on my “Bestest” or “Worstest” lists of 2023 for a few reasons:
I did not watch it yet.
I kind of knew where it was gonna go, as far as the plot was concerned.
I knew it was gonna be polarizing to say the least. Whenever you get a movie that every pseudo-intelligent “cinemaphile” adores, I am usually the first one to roll my eyes, but I think everyone kinda does that when that happens. Being a pretentious dickhead that certain websites will give $20 for their opinion does not give you clout any in my mind, nor any sane person who actually cares about what they consider art nouveau is.
I'm not going to go into that kinda rant like now, so I'm going to focus on Asteroid City, to which I can lazily say Wesley put just as much emphasis on this as he usually does which is about as much work as he puts into most of his work these days. Believe it or not, I think the whole backdrop that he conjured up where it's a stage play of people playing their own characters is actually pretty brilliant. Letting his cavalcade of actors roam with their characters is an easy thing to do, but I think he has been doing coast on this for a while now. He has a comfortable little bubble and he knows how to use it, so I won't get on his case about that even though you should listen to his rants at his production crew that get captured on disc because every movie made after 1930 has sound that is recorded. I promise that he wouldn't speak to any of his actors that way.
This was just garbled and boring for me because I honestly kept being taken out of which character was whom, what their true artifice or endeavor is, nor why I should even care about any of them to begin with. It has truly become “style over substance” for Weslenderson nowadays and I think I'm going to trademark that, or not because I don't really care about his movies that much anymore.
It's not his best work, but not his worst either and while it’s not the best movie I saw from last year, it’s not the worst either. The characters are as quirky as the sets and editing, but like I said, it feels like he is phoning this one in. Confusing in its attempt to be stylish, the whole thing comes off like they are making it up as they go. It’s the definition of “mid”.
2.5 out of 5