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Intricate structure and fantastic setting
“Asteroid City” is Wes Anderson’s 11th feature film. He also wrote the screenplay based on the original idea by himself and Roman Coppola.
First of all, although I would like to briefly introduce the story, the setting is quite complicated as usual. The setting is 1955. The film has a parallel/nested structure: a fictional new stage play called “Asteroid City” itself, behind-the-scenes footage of the play’s production, and a TV program featuring the play on. The film stars Jason Schwartzman, a regular in Anderson’s films, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Jeff Goldblum, Margot Robbie, and Jeffrey Wright. Bram, Margot Robbie, and others, the superb cast is a vertically and horizontally intertwined, complex drama.
“Asteroid City” is set in a fictional town in the desert of the American Southwest. The center of this small town of 87 residents is dominated by a motel, a gas station, and a diner. A short distance away, there is a crater that was formed by a meteorite impact in 3007 B.C. and a small observatory. Augie (played by Schwartzman), who has just lost his wife, his grieving children, and Midge (played by Johansson), a comedic actress with a traumatic past, and her daughter Dinah, visit the town for the Junior Space Science Awards celebration. However, an unexpected visitor (an alien) arrives during the celebration, and everyone who witnessed the event is stranded in Asteroid City by military order, which is the synopsis of this play within a play.
As mentioned above, the story of the play-within-a-play is also depicted in parallel, showing the delicate human relationships among the playwright, director, and actors.
