At the talkback following the Cannes premiere of his latest project, Asteroid City (2023), a reporter asked Wes Anderson about one of the many signature motifs we no longer see as much of in his films: the use of slow motion to underscore the gravity of certain scenes. Anderson seemed flustered by the question, and actually apologized for forgetting about one of his own tropes. “I have a series of ways I like to stage things and do things, and I don’t know that I’m in command of them. It’s part of my personality,” he answered. “But that’s one of the tools that I’ve used often and, you know, I should look for some spots for that. Bring back the slo-mo.” He sounded defeated. It was a truly bizarre exchange between director and critic, highlighting just how much we’ve come to rely on a singular menu of stylistic flourishes from the cutesy auteur, as well as the extent of his own dependency on meeting our expectations.

For this reason, I don’t really need to tell you what happens in Asteroid City. To be sure, a band of precocious children save the day by overcoming the stubborn cynicism of their divorced and widowed parents. As with every Anderson film since Moonrise Kingdom (2012), the colorful characters also ride out an authoritarian crackdown, which serves mainly to bring them all closer together. In Asteroid City, these authorities are the U.S. military, who quarantine the eponymous town after the appearance of an alien during a government-sponsored science fair for precocious children. It turns out that the extraterrestrial is also an agent of some kind of cosmic authority – the joke on which the film’s plot hinges is that it stopped by to inventory the meteorite that gave Asteroid City its name.

Still 1. from Wes Anderson, Asteroid City, 2023, 105 min

Still 2. from Wes Anderson, Asteroid City, 2023, 105 min

Still 3. from Wes Anderson, Asteroid City, 2023, 105 min

More Wessy still are the film’s multiple framing devices, a formal complication with which Anderson has grown increasingly obsessed. In this case, the film opens on a black-and-white television segment about the making of “Asteroid City,” a popular stage play written by the fictional Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), which intercuts the TV episode in color. This is a long way from the twee illustrations and voiceover narration that anchored The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), which implied that each scene was a come-to-life page of a beautifully illustrated J.D. Salinger novel. The major innovation here is that, for the first time ever, the point of entry into Wesworld is not literary but theatrical, entailing a host of new possibilities for meta-humor.

As in The French Dispatch (2021), which was modeled on a magazine, there is now a constant splicing between the story and its making – a disorienting juxtaposition that shows Anderson has grown more interested in mechanics than plot. In Asteroid City, the interplay between stage and backstage, as well as the winking transfiguration of actors into characters (Scarlett Johannsson is an actress playing an actress playing an actress), is much more entertaining than watching Bill Murray try to corral a bunch of literary eccentrics into meeting their deadlines. Still, this effect, while fast-paced and dazzling, ultimately estranges us from what we’re watching. In its symmetrically perfect stylizations, Wesworld feels further and further away from our own, often ugly habitus, to the point that plot developments rouse little more than curiosity. His is a mode of entertainment increasingly bereft of emotional weight.

If he hadn’t become a film director, Anderson would’ve made an excellent watchmaker. Everything he does now has the feeling of clockwork – from his steady, roughly triannual output of new movies to his mechanically precise manner of shooting, the camera always firmly strapped into place. His scripts, dependably co-written with Roman Coppola, likewise contain a panoply of tropes and characters that have become clichés of his own making, which he neither wants to abandon nor expand much beyond. The only thing that changes from one film to the next is the scale at which these gear-like motifs fit together and the speed of their churn, as we wind our way toward a credits sequence stacked with household names.

On the subject of pacing, Asteroid City’s desert location serves as a natural gateway toward some of the breakneck cartoonishness that has long been dormant in his movies. A tiny roadrunner (painstakingly stop-motion animated, of course) pops up several times in a rococo nod to Looney Tunes (1930–69). More telling still are the adorable, animated nuclear blasts that bookend the movie. In both instances, Jason Schwartzman and his family are sitting at the counter of Asteroid City’s only diner; when the mushroom clouds appear, the waitress notes dispassionately that they must be conducting another test. This is obviously a reference to the hundreds of warheads detonated at Los Alamos, New Mexico during the Cold War, but as a gag it feels wholly divorced from this history. While Schwartzman, who instinctively photographs the fallouts, claims to keep a camera with him because he’s a war photographer, the brutality of war and the devastation of nuclear holocaust are difficult to imagine in Anderson’s world, where mortality can only mean a Wile E. Coyote death – obliteration until the following scene.

Still 4. from Wes Anderson, Asteroid City, 2023, 105 min

Still 5. from Wes Anderson, Asteroid City, 2023, 105 min

Still 6. from Wes Anderson, Asteroid City, 2023, 105 min

This was not always the case. There’s a beautiful funeral scene in The Darjeeling Limited (2007), where the main characters mourn the very real (if abrupt) drowning of a child in a river. It happens to be one of the last times Anderson incorporated slow motion; Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, and Owen Wilson walk out of a mud-packed hut to “Strangers” (1970) by The Kinks. As cliché as that may sound, it was genuinely touching, and watching it today still gives me a rush of feeling that none of his recent, mechanized antics can match.

All this might suggest I think Asteroid City is a bad movie, or one hardly worth watching. Not so. It’s as charming and delightful as anything else Anderson has done, and I suspect almost everyone who sees it will come away happy. Even if one no longer experiences the surprise of Anderson’s early films, which came with the sense of a great artist reaching new heights, upsides of his turn toward the habitual include the guarantee of astonishing quality and the deep satisfaction of expectations fulfilled. The peculiarity of a new Anderson film – especially at Cannes, where the movies are so new that they often feel a little raw – is the vertigo of realizing that something essential has just been expanded upon. Like the films of Hayao Miyazaki, Maya Deren, Jacques Tati, or Terry Gilliam, Anderson’s entire career, including minor-key projects as familiar as Asteroid City, will stay with us long after he’s gone. Hopefully he has the chance to repeat himself many more times between now and then.

Still 7. from Wes Anderson, Asteroid City, 2023, 105 min

Still 8. from Wes Anderson, Asteroid City, 2023, 105 min

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