Wes Anderson's latest toy box movie seems to have consumed too many carrots. Set in a town in the middle of the desert, it almost requires sunglasses to watch as Wes turns up the kliegs to a point of almost bleaching out his signature pastel puke pallet.
A group of science whiz kids and their parents, a movie star, along with a grieving dad and his kids find themselves confined in Asteroid City, population 7, by the government when an alien decides to drop in on a campfire one nite. Accompanying the story is a confused absurdist sub-plot trying to figure out what is happening on a parallel plain.
Anderson's world of dead panned weebles, spouting gibberish and non-sequitur wears thin fast as he bombards the audience with banal and clever visual moments that fail to advance the story, probably too hard to figure or care about in the first place.
His players feature a huge all-star cast mostly reciting and offering nothing; only perhaps to show us what good sports they are appearing in Pee Wee's playhouse. The insipid dialogue would suffer even worse without the celebrity mug spouting it. A soddenly pretentious and self indulgent work by someone riding on the same fumes since Grand Hotel Budapest.
A group of science whiz kids and their parents, a movie star, along with a grieving dad and his kids find themselves confined in Asteroid City, population 7, by the government when an alien decides to drop in on a campfire one nite. Accompanying the story is a confused absurdist sub-plot trying to figure out what is happening on a parallel plain.
Anderson's world of dead panned weebles, spouting gibberish and non-sequitur wears thin fast as he bombards the audience with banal and clever visual moments that fail to advance the story, probably too hard to figure or care about in the first place.
His players feature a huge all-star cast mostly reciting and offering nothing; only perhaps to show us what good sports they are appearing in Pee Wee's playhouse. The insipid dialogue would suffer even worse without the celebrity mug spouting it. A soddenly pretentious and self indulgent work by someone riding on the same fumes since Grand Hotel Budapest.