asteroid city...

I went along to the Watershed this afternoon to watch Wes Anderson’s latest film “Asteroid City”. I’m afraid I’m a bit of a Wes Anderson film geek, so you’ll just have to take what I have to say about the film with a huge pinch of salt!
The film is set in a South-western American desert in 1955. There is a tiny town, Asteroid City, which simply comprises a motel, a garage, and rows of small white cabins. A meteorite landed there 3,000 years ago, and the resulting bright orange crater is the site of a government observatory. This town is regularly used to host a ‘Junior Stargazers and Space Cadets Convention’ (to which scientifically brilliant high-school students are invited to show off their inventions).
It’s an amusing and bizarrely wonderful film – beautifully designed (pedantically so some might say) in Anderson’s tell-tale style… with his ‘usual’ emphasis on flat two-dimensional backdrops/formal symmetry but with, in this film, an intense pastel-coloured, iridescent Kodak colour palette. 
Many of the actors are Anderson ‘regulars’: Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody and Jake Ryan (and others)… but the film also features Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Margot Robbie and Maya Hawke (who I thought made an excellent prim school teacher).
The storyline is a little too complicated for my taste. I felt that telling it through the eyes of its fictional author was unnecessary (there were enough other stories interwoven as it was… but hey!).
I really enjoyed the film, but know that - as with all Anderson films – I will need to watch it again in order to catch more of the carefully-crafted ‘incidentals’ squeezed into several of the scenes (including ‘Road Runner’).