![]() ![]() ![]() The film is a retro-futuristic treat, a creative throwback extraterrestrial invasion movie, festooned with the hallmarks of a 50s sci-fi B-feature. And it is in this place, at a moment when teen geniuses, rowdy kids, scientists, cowboys, military officers, teachers, and parents all gather for the unveiling of America’s greatest future scientist, that the town gets a visit from an alien who wants the asteroid back. Woodrow, meanwhile, has befriended the four other nerdy finalists-especially Dinah (Grace Edwards), the daughter of movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson).Īsteroid City, the place, is a visual portmanteau of different eras of the American West-part John Ford cowboy-canyon vista, part Los Alamos (the secret pop-up town in New Mexico where the Manhattan Project built the Atom Bomb), part 50s Palm Springs retreat, part Looney Tunes Road Runner cartoon. Unsure how to handle things, Augie calls his father-in-law, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks), to watch the girls. We learn the most about the Steenbeck family: the father Augie (an excellent Jason Schwartzman) and his son Woodrow, or “Brainiac” (Jake Ryan), and his three mischievous little girls.Īugie, a former war photographer, doesn’t know how to tell his kids that their mother has passed away from her long illness three weeks before they began their trip to take Woodrow to the award ceremony of the science competition in which he is a finalist. In Asteroid City, a science competition for extraordinary youths presented by the Research and Experimentation Division of the United States Government brings five families to the small town of Asteroid City, which doesn’t have much besides the military science facility, a diner, a hotel, and the asteroid itself. It had seemed, from the advertisements, that Asteroid City would be Wes Anderson’s first sci-fi movie, and it is, but it’s also more a film exploring the relationship between science and art-the shared investments of scientists and artists-and how everyone is equally in pursuit of an understanding of what it means to be alive and a part of the universe. ![]() When I was watching Asteroid City, the new film from Wes Anderson, I kept thinking of a line from The Fabelmans, the Steven Spielberg movie that came out last year: “in our family, it’s the scientists versus the artists.” Asteroid City is a film about a group of strangers in September 1955 who all wind up in a desert town made famous by an ancient asteroid impact, now populated with scientists doing astronomical research and atomic bomb testing. ![]()
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