Wes Anderson is known for making hilarious, if quirky and heartfelt, audience-pleasing movies. When he burst onto the scene with his second film, “Rushmore,” in 1998, he established himself as a presence in Hollywood, one with an unmistakable style and approach to filmmaking. Over the years, that style has mostly served him well, from “The Royal Tenenbaums” to “The Life Aquatic” and even to his stop-motion animation telling of “The Fantastic Mr. Fox.”
With “Asteroid City,” his latest, he sticks with his signature visual mold while also offering a new iteration of his unique approach to storytelling. Alas, maybe it would’ve been better had he stayed fully within the box he’s created for himself, for despite the generally positive reviews, “Asteroid City” is a flaming dumpster fire.
Set in the 1950s and loosely centered around an astronomy convention for gifted kids set in the fictitious town of Asteroid City, the movie tells the story of … something. Spoiler alert — though even as I am a huge Anderson fan, I would not recommend watching this movie — toward the end of the film, the main character breaks the fourth wall, a staple of the movie, and tells the fictitious director he doesn’t understand what’s going on. Maybe it was just that he didn’t understand why his character had chosen to burn his hand on a tabletop griddle. I forget which it was. Either way, I was hoping for an answer, because I was equally baffled as to what I was
