A Week in Media #1: Asteroid City
A recap for what I watched, heard, or played this week.
So as a starter, I should probably explain briefly what this series is gonna be. The concept is simple: every week, I recap / review a piece of media that I have recently experienced, in the form of a relatively short article (at least shorter than my other articles are). They can be positive (let’s be honest, it’s mostly going to be positive), but they can also be negative in nature. It can be a movie, a TV series, a game, a Youtube video, a song/album, or even a book (in decreasing likelihood of being featured, by the way). Nevertheless, what I feature in A Week in Media will always have something interesting to talk about, whether it’s the content of the piece itself or the even discussion around it. So without further ado, here’s A Week in Media #1!
Asteroid City: A Misunderstood Masterpiece
Yeah, I know, I’m a snob.
For hardcore fans, a quintessential Wes film. For critics and a sizeable portion of audiences, the first of Wes’ failures. Anderson’s newest Asteroid City has racked quite the number of criticisms since its muted release amongst box office giants like Across The Spiderverse, The Flash, and Dead Reckoning. Anderson, has of course, seen his fair amount of critics over his past couple of films. His blatantly artificial style and awkward, monotone dialogue has detached many from the messages of his work, and I won’t blame them. A casual film enjoyer is *not* going to adapt easily to Anderson’s highly calculated quirks, especially when it seems that said style is universal — an unnecessary director’s mark that doesn’t help sell the story and message to its audience.
I like his style, though.
In a world of mind-bogglingly boring superhero flicks taking over the film industry, where cinematography is not just monotone and flat for the entire movie, but actively being ruined by CGI-scorched shots that makes my eyes burn, does it hurt to just have *one* super quirky director that does whatever he wants? His style, despite not being specially unique, is one that clearly resonates with modern audiences’ sentiments of the film industry — one that is tired of monotony. Hell, even the recent Tiktok trends kind of prove it to an extent, despite their fundamental misunderstanding of his style (a topic for a future article?). They *want* something new, something fresh and bold despite being largely meaningless.
And so, emboldened by the success that was The Great Budapest, Wes Anderson pivoted. The French Dispatch probably should have warned us of the direction in which Wes was headed, but most of us ignored it as a personalized film that Wes would only make once — an arthouse flick that wasn’t on the same level as Budapest. We were dead wrong.
And so, Asteroid City surprised me. Expecting a return to Budapest (which was largely supported by the marketing they released; it seemed like a return to a conventional story), I was utterly confounded and probably a bit disoriented when from the very first scene. Asteroid City took a very meta-centric and subtext-heavy narrative as its core, and I found my first watching of the film rather disappointing. Despite pulling at my heartstrings at some moments, the film’s branching and overlapping narratives largely made the film feel empty, and most certainly lacking finality. Hell, some scenes that seemingly call for the audience to look forward to something are just non-existent. It was just *that* confusing.
But as the credits rolled, the message from Wes was obvious.
Watch it again.
And so I did. Unlike many critics who post their review the second they exited the theatre, I went back and watched the entire meta-narrative unfold once more. And to my surprise (or maybe not?), the film has miraculously completed itself. Somehow, seemingly incoherent scenes now make perfect sense, and scenes that felt like they shouldn’t be there now felt that they should. With a direction on where the film was headed, many new clues and hints that were cleverly hidden spring into life, giving scenes new meaning that flow seamlessly into the narrative. By the end of the second watching, I was still felt incomplete, but felt more satisfied than I did on the first watching.
Wes… certainly did something here. Hell, he even explicitly stated that Asteroid City should be watched twice, and it’s pretty clear why. He practically crafted the entire film to be watched again to be completely understood, and that’s… weird. I don’t know how to feel about that.
On one side, this is certainly bold. Of course, the style of the film itself is certainly its own merit, but I’ve seen enough of it (and perhaps even more boldly) in The French Dispatch, and perhaps also executed more fittingly there. Here, the style here is just salad dressing, like how it was on the Grand Budapest Hotel; style for the sake of style. The main boldness is, of course, the double narrative. A seemingly incoherent plot that flip-flops between two different realities, tied together in the form that it ended up being is no insignificant feat. Of course, I won’t spoil too much of the details here, it’s truly better experienced yourself, in a proper theatre. I just wonder… was this possible without that initial confusion on the first watching?
I mean, I argue that Wes has achieved a similar feat in the French Dispatch. That film certainly has new angles and hidden clues sprinkled everywhere, but you didn’t need to watch it twice to get that sense of finality. The three short stories of the French Dispatch perfectly stood on its own without being rewatched fully to comprehend, though rewatching it certainly added value. Budapest was even simpler: you practically got everything on your first watching. I want to believe that this was done on purpose, as it somewhat fits with the theme of the film; being grief, art, and how to carry on with both while still carrying the baggage of both. I’m just afraid that it wasn’t done clearly enough — which is certainly true amongst its critics. Most feel that the film is, as I felt on my first watching, unfocused and empty.
Maybe I’m just overthinking this. Maybe most audiences *did* watch this film twice and still didn’t like it, though I doubt it. The film is surprisingly heavy for its style, which adds to its misdirection even more. Unlike Fight Club or other films with fantastically written twists, this film doesn’t explicitly sell the idea of a misdirection as its focus, which may be the fault of its marketing team more than Wes’s own writing and directing. It feels more like what Babylon did — a strong and incredibly well-crafted film that had a bold message; overshadowed by consumer expectations, that again, was misled by marketing.
Nevertheless, like Babylon, Asteroid City is a film that I think (or at least, hope) will have a new life. Given its misdirected marketing and pretty muted release, it’s not that surprising for the film to be the most contested of Anderson’s works. But at its heart, it is one of the best executions of a story about grief, intermixed with a story about art that parallels both concepts very strongly. That alone, is something that I think more and more will appreciate in the coming years, and hopefully make this film into more of a cinematic masterpiece than an arthouse letdown.
Next Up on A Week in Media: Disco Elysium (The First Playthrough)!
