Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City: Forecasting the entire film from the trailer alone
Asteroid City’s honest synopsis: In a desert town populated by quirky, well-tailored, white people a strange mystery falls from the heavily edited ether… but not before a few long-running scenes of abnormal domesticity are squeezed in there to show you that this town was absurd long before the aliens arrived. And also to give dear old Wes Anderson a chance to throw in some lines that he thinks are both funny and smart before plot gets in the way.
Welcome to the symmetrical, cartoon world of Anderson’s fashionable take on the Roswell incident. Obviously, a plot like an alien invasion is far too consuming for the hipster director, so, in this rare instance, Hollywood has the spaceship merely hovering over the whole film as an engine to power peculiar antics and comic costume changes—ala Tom Hanks, or indeed all of the cast, wearing daft archaic space helmets in a jaunty fashion. Who knows, maybe even Scarlett Johansson’s character will wear a Barbarella-type number to bring a minuscule moment of sex appeal to the movie.
Under the influence of a green glow, our funny little characters’ lives will fall apart only to be put back together again. Whether or not Jason Schwartzman’s kooky character will end up getting with Johansson’s idiosyncratic character after they fall in love only three weeks on from the death of his wife, or Anderson has deemed that too obvious and opted instead for the less glossy-eyed approach of having the norms of mourning ensure that their love stays forbidden, remains to be seen. However, it is patently apparent that the frisson between them will drive the plot more than the presence of a UFO.
Another arc to look out for is Schwartzman doing something heroic to redeem himself in the eyes of his stoic father-in-law (Hanks) and getting a firm hand on the shoulder to close proceedings with a sense of catharsis. On the other hand, it would seem that Steve Carell will be entirely arc-less, a character in there as the only full comic actor in the comedy movie. Perhaps to seal this fact he will even be disappointingly killed off towards the end in some ridiculous manner like being crushed under a prop that has been designed by the art department with devastating charm.
And then comes the absolute end… I’ll be damned if the errand spaceship simply zooms back of into the ether having taught our cast of esteemed weirdos an important lesson about life. Anderson might be obvious in some senses, but he is not without a flair for a daft surprise. No, the moot point of what happens to this craft will likely be a little dafter than a mere ‘moral of the story’ generator—perhaps it will be a Soviet faux craft deployed as an Andersonian Cold War tactic and our ET is just an Estonian with green face-paint… or maybe it will end the world leaving nothing but Asteroid City intact, perhaps it will claim the caged asteroid itself despite an army marshall desperately clinging to it, or it could simply be nuked by some Trumpian president. Alas, who knows how this tragedy will close its cool-looking curtains, our only hope is that it doesn’t take too long to get there.
A slew of potential charming occurrences:
With both Jarvis Cocker and Seu Jorge in the cast, we would like to entertain the possibility that an indie duet – perhaps by the pair in a singing cowboy duo – is part of this flick.
As per every other Anderson film, an animal will definitely be maimed at some point. If the climate of Asteroid City is too harsh a biosphere for earthly biology, then perhaps the alien will be accidentally harmed.
In the trailer it is very clear that Hanks has a gun holstered clumsily in his trousers—if this doesn’t go off at some point for comic effect then Anderson has broken Chekhov’s golden rule.
An extra with an intensely interesting face will steal a scene.
And perhaps most obvious of all… at least a few characters and scenes will be incredibly insufferable and yet it will, ultimately, be shrouded in nothing but four stars, because just look at that beautiful poster—how in my right mind could I hang that in my flat without at least pretending I thought it was very funny in the sort of way that doesn’t make you laugh.
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