Asteroid City proves Wes Anderson can’t be copied, by AI or anyone else

This review is asteroid city It comes from the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Please look forward to the further development of the movie for the theater release in June.

Moviegoers have never run the risk of mistaking Wes Anderson’s films for anyone else’s work, but his personality has grown with age. Storyteller and visual his stylist, Anderson creates instantly recognizable, highly decorative and seemingly evocative pieces.He’s a feast for the eyes just by laying his eggs fashion trends, Photo albumhit Instagram accountand the recent wave of AI-generated art Lifestyle TikTok Parody They provide conclusive evidence that there is a huge gap between artistry and algorithms. But despite his trademark tweed visual style, an ubiquitous part of popular culture, asteroid city Proving that there is still no one like Wes Anderson.

Anderson has spent decades making epic, joyous, poignant, and profound films, but he has strayed from a naturalistic, poignant sensibility. bottle rocket, rushmoreand Royal Tenenbaums. He takes it to the next level as a filmmaker by focusing on visually extravagant flights of fancy.His latest film — neo-baroque architecture with matryoshka dolls The Grand Budapest Hotel To the shining Judespri Dispatch to France — It moves away from the present and into a bygone era, adding a plethora of extravagant, stunningly honest visual details.

asteroid cityThis, his 11th feature film, is as dizzyingly ambitious as those films in recreating the mid-century American Southwest circa 1955. The desert town of Asteroid City is named after a giant meteor crater and a nearby observatory. This is a small outpost of civilization (population: 87) surrounded by sun-baked terrain and turquoise skies.

The 12-stool Ranch Net, the One Pump gas station, the 10-cabin Motor Court Hotel, and the phone booths dominate the local attractions. A mushroom cloud looms in the distance, a reminder of the melancholy of the nuclear disaster at the time. Broken station wagons and unfinished exit ramps point to a busier settlement once planned for the area. But now most of the traffic, including government trains carrying Pontiacs, Pecans and nuclear warheads, is passing through.

asteroid city Don’t open in this desert town. It begins with a black-and-white studio set, featuring a Rod Serling-esque host (breaking badBryan Cranston) is the entire film, staged by a troupe of New York stage actors, including Tennessee Williams-adjacent playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and his lead actor Jones Hall (Jason). was constructed as an unperformed stage play. Schwartzman) and Mercedes Ford (Scarlett Johansson). “asteroid city Doesn’t exist,” says the host. “This is a fictional drama produced specifically for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text is hypothetical, and the events are false fabrications.”

Establishing the legendary American West and New York’s legendary actors’ studios as a corner of mythical Americana floating just outside the action, Anderson rushes back to the desert as he shoots through the frame and cheeks the Roadrunner. When the boxy aspect ratio of the frame segment opened to a dazzling widescreen, key players, including four teenage science geniuses and their families, were convened for his 1955 Junior Stargazer competition, where five Judged by the General of the Star Army (Jeffrey Wright). ) and a highly regarded aloof astronomer (Tilda Swinton, it might go without saying).

For Auggie Steenbeck (Schwartzman), a war photographer still grieving for his late wife, cramming his three daughters and brainy son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) into the tree-lined Mercury Monterey. , it was difficult to head to the desert–especially since he had never experienced it–still told the children about their mother’s death. “Time is never right,” he says to his father-in-law (Tom Hanks), who kindly replies, “Time is always wrong.”

Photo: Pop. 87 Productions/Featured Features

Meanwhile, movie star Midge Campbell (Johansson) brings his daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards), an astronomer, to Asteroid City, where she is known to play the “tragic abused alcoholic.” He is rehearsing for a new role as one of the “patients”. Midge checks into the cabin across from Auggie, and they begin a warm rapport. Elsewhere in town, a handsome cowpoke (Rupert Friend) looks to her while a teacher (Maya Hawke) struggles to keep her young students in. And the motel’s owner (Steve Carell) happily acknowledges any complaints from guests.

Anderson’s ensemble cast is as synonymous with his style as his visual trademark at this point, and every actor here tunes into his eccentric dialogue. Schwartzman has been a regular in Anderson films since 1995. rushmore come to the limelight in asteroid cityAnd he pulls off the typical Andersonian sly blend of humor and melancholy. The script (written by Anderson, with film director Roman Coppola co-crediting the story) ranks among his most moving and pointillist works. Ranked.

As the Stargazer Convention begins and brings confusion and delays, Anderson balances the central action in the desert with the dramatic challenges facing New York theater companies to accurately portray it. Jones realized that Auggie’s grief was immeasurable, and wondered aloud, “Am I doing him the right thing?” But that feeling of being immersed in the role is part of what brings him closer to the likeness of the truth.

Anderson’s ingenious framing device, actor playing actor, pits all these characters against each other and provokes emotion. asteroid city, turning it into something richer than the perfectly affable desert charmer the trailer conveys. Anderson focuses on the great cosmic mystery of existence. Some are cosmic, some are terrestrial, and some are based on human emotions. His recent films have revealed that he is a prolific philosophical filmmaker who enjoys studying his own artistic interests from afar, through the fog of memory. . The Grand Budapest Hoteland by turning the storytelling itself into a subject, Dispatch to France.

Photo: Pop. 87 Productions/Featured Features

Anderson’s signature pastel palette, relentlessly symmetrical compositions, and swirling layers of art open up a whole world of miniatures. His carefully designed and constructed film dioramas often collapse the distance between film, theater and other visual art forms.living pictures” was a precursor to radio. Over the years he and cinematographer Robert Yeoman worked together to rewrite the rules of rapid tracking shots. It’s hard to think of any other filmmaker who pans and tilts the camera with his level of sophistication and deadpan wit.

Anderson’s films are similarly unique in their emotional drive. The characters are fantastical, but their fascination with escapism and adventure is deeply felt and accompanied by a strong sense of whimsical wonder. His exotic lands make his stories feel like a nostalgic, distant dream.Nostalgia is at the heart asteroid city It’s about as good as his past films, even though the imaginative design is far more fantastical than the actual history.

Anderson continues to progress rapidly as a filmmaker, making his world more exaggerated and artificial with each new project, gently inviting audiences to embrace the universality of his characters’ emotions.and asteroid city, he conveys the essentials about the creation and re-creation of art, and the role of art itself, especially how it helps people process trauma and unforeseen events. In his view, art allows us to understand what we can understand and to accept what we cannot. It’s fun on the surface, but it’s also layered, existential poetry. It’s Wes Anderson’s most mature magic, and it’s his most peculiar thing, something no one else can catch, especially not his AI.

asteroid city In the United States, it will be released in limited theaters on June 16th, and will be released nationwide on June 23rd.