Review: Asteroid City (2023)
I recommend watching the movie before reading this.
published on June 28th, 2023
updated on June 28th, 2023
estimated reading time: 3 min
I saw Asteroid City and I read a review of the film by Sasha Chapin then I decided to write about it too.
I thought the movie was good but definitely weird. This movie has an alien in it and that increases my personal interest and enjoyment of it significantly. Wes Anderson is doing the whole meta/breaking the fourth wall/multiple timelines and locations thing that is having a moment in media right now. Heâs also doing the whole Movies Where Nothing Happensâ˘ď¸ thing. Nothing happens in this movie and you have to make of that what you will. Itâs even addressed in bits of the dialog, one character saying aloud âitâs about infinityâ. Towards the end of the movie one character says to another something along the lines of: âyou donât know what youâre doing but you just keep goingâ. These are point blank acknowledgements that this film is about nothing and has no plot. No conflicts get resolved because they donât exist. Thereâs a moment where General Grif Gibson (played by Jeffrey Wright) is about to read a supposedly furious telegram from the President, which would introduce some drama, but then he just doesnât read it! The characters all end up exactly as they were in the beginning except Woodrow Steenbeck (played by Jake Ryan) has a girlfriend at the end.
The alien appears very briefly and does basically nothing. None of the humans do anything either except for Augie Steenback, a war photographer (played by Jason Schwartzman) who takes a photo. Side note: the orchestral string music during that scene is fantastic and adds the necessary charm to a moment that could have been incredibly cheesy but wasnât.
I like to think this movie is saying âthe purpose of life is to take photosâ. A metaphor for making memories. Take photos of the weird stuff that happens in your weird little life. Take photos of the people you might be falling in love with. Iâve been thinking a lot about taking photos recently. I read this article about taking photos and this one too. I find myself carrying around my lil disposable Kodak FunSavers and temporarily blinding my friends with the flash or shooting some landscape or shooting whatever I might be about to eat with increasing frequency. I like it, itâs fun. I like riding my bike to the film shop and dropping off the camera and having the clerk tell me it will be several days until I see the photos. Waiting to get film scans back has got to be one of the truest forms of delayed gratification millennials with iPhones can know. Check out some of my film photos here.
I like to think this movie is asking viewers to reclaim their Childlike Wonderâ˘ď¸ and make art and share it with their friends. After seeing the alien, the schoolchildren are no longer interested in their normal classroom lecture topics, they just want to talk about the alien and make sculptures of itâs flying saucer or draw the alienâs hypothetical home planet and compose and song and dance about the event (not sure if the dance is supposed to be a TikTok reference, or?)
I think it takes courage to write a movie where aliens come to Earth and nothing happens, its global news for like a week and then everyone just moves on and is left to carry with them the memories (photos) of the past. Is the alien a metaphor for the pandemic? Was the quarantine a metaphor for theâŚ.quarantine? Is it always today?
Definitely see this movie, nothing happens and its just for fun, kind of maybe like life itself.