Film review: Wes Anderson's Asteroid City

**

In the fragmented and divided bubbleverse of the 21st century, where niche shall speak to niche, perhaps the only sane option left is to be discerning in your choice of bubble.

Since the mid-90s, writer-director Wes Anderson has been carefully, meticulously, painstakingly, constructing cinema’s most desirable bubble.

It’s a self-contained little world with only the very best people – add Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Adrien Brody, Margot Robie and Rupert Friend to the names listed below.

Scarlett Johansson stars as Midge Campbell in Wes Anderson's ASTEROID CITY, (Image: Courtesy of Pop 87 Productions/Focus Features)

Certainly, it is a world of privilege, more than a little bit elitist; when you take this much care over the fixtures and fitting you don’t want the hoi polloi blundering around and messing it up. It is a world of exquisite delights, but one always teetering on the verge of disappearing up its own exquisite backside.

Theoretically, this is a move into sci-fi. Set in 1955, newly widowed Augie Steebeck (Schwarztman) brings his children, including brainiac son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) to a Junior Stargazers/ Space cadet convention in a desert town in New Mexico. But Asteroid City, a place where atomic bomb tests are commonplace on the horizon, is about to be disrupted by an earth-shattering event.

Wes Anderson's Asteroid City (Image: Courtesy of Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features)

It’s a place that’s been a little too much in the sun, the palette has been bleached to yellows and greens; an arid landscape that's a match for a film that is artistically parched.

It opens with a black-and-white sequence with Cranston as narrator of a TV show taking us through the artistic process of dashing American playwright Conrad Earp (Ed Norton) writing the play Asteroid City and overseeing its production.

Of all the twists the film could take, being the film of a play was perhaps the last you'd expect. The stubbornly undramatic events in Asteroid City don't look like they have been written for the stage, nor do they look like something that could be presented theatrically. You will soon come to resent this framing device as an unnecessary intrusion.

Asteroid City (Image: Courtesy of Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features)

Against that, the black-and-white backstage events are probably more interesting than what is happening in Asteroid City, where a star-studded cast mill around to no great purpose. Really, nothing happens apart from the earth-shattering event, which the film tosses aside as no big deal.

As ever with the Scorcese of twee, there are lovely images and moments of deadpan humour, but surely not enough. At the screening, we were presented with a box of Asteroid City popcorn. The wrapping was immaculate, but once inside, there wasn't that much to consume. How very Anderson; the popcorn is his most eloquent critique.

Scarlett Johansson in Asteroid City (Image: Courtesy of Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features)

Directed by Wes Anderson. Starring Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright and Steve Carell. In cinemas June 23.