Notes on Asteroid City (2023)

I saw Wes Anderson's latest last week. It was turquoise and gold and set in the desert. Not a city like its title suggests; more like a truck stop, one "made" from an asteroid and its impact crater, later visited by an alien who takes the asteroid, only to return it a couple days later.

The Roswell myth, 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) ... If great American directors like Kubrick and Spielberg can make a science fiction film, so can Anderson.

Five families arrive in Asteroid City, each with a child who is a finalist for a science prize. When alone, the children compete with each other to see who is smartest, though the measure of intelligence is based not on thinking but on memory. No luck. They can't come up with anything. So: Are they equally as smart or equally as stupid? Neither. They are children! declares Anderson. Leave them alone! You've forsaken the right to understand them!

(Oscar Wilde's It's not enough that I should succeed, but all my friends must fail. Not sure anyone outside Asteroid City -- and this film has an outside meta-layer -- is ever attributed. Like fairy tales, Anderson's films exist independent of the world as we know it.)

Also in Anderson's films: there is a family or five and they are broken. The leads are always tightly-wound eccentrics whose idea of intimacy is tied to distance. Up top is a father of one of the finalists and the mother of another falling for each other from the windows of opposing huts. 

I forget what happens in the end, but we are led out of the film with a ripping tune whose name also escapes me. Oh, and the lighting. The play of shadow and light, when most everything else is flat.