Wes Anderson delivers cosmic quirk-fest 

There are a few things in life you can count on: taxes, traffic, and Wes Anderson films being delightfully offbeat, impeccably symmetrical, and full of eccentric characters that seem plucked from the pages of an edgy comic book. 

Asteroid City, which began streaming on Showmax this week, is Anderson’s latest plunge into one of his own meticulously crafted universes. It delivers what fans expect, including the unexpected. And a UFO for good measure.

Set in a pastel-colored, fictional desert town in 1955, Asteroid City plays out like an art-house fever dream of B-movie sci-fi. The town, sparsely populated and visually reminiscent of a child’s school project, is hosting a junior stargazers convention.

Naturally, it attracts the kind of quirky characters that Wes Anderson loves. 

(Full disclosure: I asked ChatGPT to write the following character summaries, because it does it so well, when given appropriate prompts.)

There’s the brooding war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman, doing his best “I’ve seen things” stare), a father of four who’s mourning his wife’s death by avoiding all the important conversations with his kids. 

Scarlett Johansson plays Midge Campbell, a movie star holed up in a motor lodge who’s as mysterious as she is fabulous (and seriously, where does Anderson find these wigs?).

Tilda Swinton is the convention’s delightfully odd scientist (are you even in a Wes Anderson film if you don’t have at least three peculiar quirks?), while Tom Hanks plays Augie’s father-in-law, Woodrow, who looks like he got lost on his way to a Coen Brothers film set. 

And then there’s Jeff Goldblum… though you might blink and miss him in his cameo as the alien. It’s one of the most whimsical, bizarrely necessary aliens to grace science fiction cinema.

The alien is there for a meteorite that is the reason everyone’s in Asteroid City in the first place. Its appearance is handled with such a straight face that I almost forget I was watching something utterly absurd. That’s the magic of Anderson: he presents the ridiculous as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

The alien represents cosmic mystery, a sense of wonder, and the utter randomness of life — things that, deep down, all of Anderson’s films explore. The alien is quirky, yes, but it’s also essential.

The alien’s appearance also sets off one of the film’s most hilarious moments: a government-imposed quarantine on the town, trapping all the characters in one place.

The symmetry of the movie is almost unsettling, it is so perfect. So I asked ChatGPT to tell  me more about this style, and why it grabbed me so hard.

It said: “The symmetry is so perfect that you might find yourself adjusting your chair to match the screen’s balance. Every shot looks like it could be a perfectly arranged postcard, though you’d be sending it from a very weird, very Wes Anderson desert vacation. The color palette, naturally, is somewhere between ‘pastel dream’ and ‘vintage postcard,’ with an almost eerie nostalgia for a 1950s that never really existed. It’s as if Anderson gave a retro Polaroid camera sentience, and it decided to direct a film.”

Who needs critics? But seriously, in true Anderson fashion, Asteroid City doesn’t wrap things up neatly. The quarantine ends, people leave, and the alien? Well, let’s just say it doesn’t bother with goodbyes.

* Asteroid City began streaming on Showmax this week.

* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on social media on @art2gee.