Asteroid City could be a great choice among Prime Video’s options if you want something visually rich, funny, and fairly light. Being a Wes Anderson movie, it’s meticulously designed, twee and weird, and has a truly ridiculous cast. But like his best movies (such as The Royal Tenenbaums) it has a simple emotional story that makes it easier to grip onto than some of Anderson’s movies. And it has an alien.
Jason Schwartzman plays Augie Woodrow, whose wife has just died, and he’s taken his kids to a stargazing convention rather than tell them about this tragedy. This grief-driven sub-optimal parenting is then compounded by the tiny desert town he’s saying in becoming quarantined when an alien artefact is discovered there, delaying their visit, and prolonging his deception – but also introducing him to Scarlett Johansson, as famous movie star Midge Campbell, also visiting the convention. Then a UFO lands, and the town is quarantined by the military.
Being a Wes Anderson film, there's a ton of extra vignettes happening all over the place – kids falling in love, people trying to escape the quarantine, a documentary that's presenting all this information to us – but with Augie’s family dynamic at its heart, Asteroid City feels like these are revolving around a more stable core than in some Anderson movies.
Its fourth-wall-breaking documentary moments are fun, Tom Hanks cruises in doing his America’s Dad thing to tidy up the emotional mess Schwartzman got himself into, and there are tons of cool cameos – including one from one of today's biggest stars in the best, and most emotional, scene of the movie, which comes as a total surprise.
If you’re not already into Anderson’s style, this is unlikely to change your mind, but as someone who’s very up and down on his work myself, I had a good time with this one – and I think it channels his style into something thematic better than most, because it becomes an exploration of just how weird it is to be quarantined and to have to be exploring yourself during that time, and viewers will have some experience of that in the not too distant past…
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