When Wes Anderson makes a movie there are a few things that you can be sure of. It will be shot beautifully. The dialogue will be delivered as dryly as humanly possible. The cast will be absolutely out of this world. The new trailer for Asteroid City gives us all that, and also a plot that is equally out of this world because Wes Anderson's new film has been invaded by aliens.
The first trailer for Anderson's next project, Asteroid City is here and it's going to be everything Wes Anderson fans could possibly be hoping for. Frequent collaborator Jason Schwartzman is here, playing a father who has found himself stranded in the titular city when a series of incredible events transpire. Everybody ends up stuck in the small desert town, including Scarlett Johansson, playing a famous actress, and Tom Hanks, playing Schwartzman's father-in-law. Check out the trailer above.
The cast of a Wes Anderson movie is almost always incredible. There are clearly a lot of actors who love to work with him and just as many who would love to do so. The list of stars at the end of the trailer just goes on forever. It includes numerous actors who have worked with Anderson before, like Tilda Swinton and Jeff Goldblum and others who have not appeared in his films, like Margot Robbie. A lot of the actors listed we don't even see in the trailer so we'll have to wait and see what they do.
Tom Hanks' brief appearance in the trailer already makes one wonder how it took this long for him to appear in a Wes Anderson movie. He seems perfectly at home, Andseron's unique style of dialogue delivery feels like something Hanks was born to do.
The idea of Wes Anderson making an "alien invasion" movie is bizarre in itself, like Wes Anderson making a superhero movie, which may be why the idea seems to work so well. The movie looks to basically be Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but with the actual aliens being an afterthought. The movie talk about an alien, but doesn't actually show it to us, because in the end, the movie is about the people in the town dealing with this strange event, not the event itself. The most alien thing about the film is the way everybody talks because human beings just don't have conversations the way they do in Wes Anderson movies.
Wes Anderson movies are not exactly massive hits, they are something of an acquired taste, but for those of us that have acquired it, Asteroid City looks to be everything we could be hoping for. The movie is set to open this June, which will make for a bit of counter-programming in the 2023 summer blockbuster season. While we're used to seeing movies full of aliens come out in June, those movies have never looked quite like this.
