Film: Asteroid City
Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody
Director: Wes Anderson
Rating: 3/5
Runtime: 105 min.

Wes Anderson’s latest is yet another highly stylized narrative of cosmic significance. It’s hard for the general audience to get emotionally connected with Anderson’s stories but there’s plenty of goodies to be had in the framing, visual design, and poignance with which he narrates his multi-pronged stories. “Asteroid City,” his latest collaboration with cinematographer Robert Yeoman, is certainly wondrously beautiful to look at.

This film opens in documentary format, black-and-white, circa 1955, in the United States of America, narrated by Bryan Cranston, who tells the story of the theatrical “Asteroid City,” in which some of the key figures are a fictional playwright named Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody). Earp’s play is set at a remote Western meteor crash site hosting a Space Camp in which several scholastically gifted teens are presenting futuristic inventions.