Sci-fi is a genre that appears to be getting less fun by the decade. In the early 1900s, George Méliès imagined that the moon was populated by lunar goddesses, stripy, insectoid aliens and giant, psychedelic mushrooms. These days we’re fully aware it’s just a boring rock in space that even Nasa hasn’t bothered to visit in 50 years. Nobody believes in aliens except far-out conspiracy theorists and Khloé Kardashian.
Why then has arch-eccentric Wes Anderson chosen now to debut his first sci-fi movie? Asteroid City, the new trailer for which dropped this week, centres on a 1955 convention of young stargazers in a fictional US desert town. It features just about every indie actor from the past half a century or so; from Scarlett Johansson to Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton to Bryan Cranston, and teases the possibility of some kind of alien intervention among the geeky Americana and whistling sand dunes.
But is this really a sci-fi movie at all? And even if it is, will it be remembered as such? For surely Anderson’s own quintessential flourishes are guaranteed to torpedo any genre he might choose to work within? If this were an Anderson horror movie, those terrifying blood spatters would still be perfectly balanced with the film-maker’s trademark tan and teal colour palette. Should Anderson choose to take on Lord of the Rings, we can imagine Gandalf and Frodo speaking in bizarre, staccato speech patterns, as if not really engaged in conversation at all, but lost in an artsy, double-handed freeze-frame of kookiness. This is a guy, remember, who turned Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox into a musing on the hubris of middle-aged white men with too much fondness for the good things in life.
And yet setting Asteroid City in the 1950s allows Anderson to offset all that stylistic artifice with some genuine Mercury/Gemini/Apollo-era fascination with the stars. This was a time when aliens really might have been out there, when the incredible optimism generated by space travel hadn’t yet been crushed by the realisation that the only interesting planets were at least 4.367 light years from Earth. We still believed!
In some ways this seems the perfect setting for an Anderson movie, perhaps even the perfect genre. There will still be male failings, precocious children, awkward pauses and unusual conversational tempos in among the wonder at our universe’s infinite potential. We will still get the impression walking out of the cinema that every character is probably just another version of Anderson himself, seen through a different filter – even the ones who look like little green men.
Will there be aliens at all? Or will everyone just talk about them a lot? It probably doesn’t matter much. This is Anderson’s movie, he makes the rules and it only has to make sense on his terms. As long as the aliens stare into the camera and deliver their stilted lines with an arched eyebrow and the verve and panache of Lauren Bacall smoking a Chesterfield, it’s likely most of us won’t even notice if and when they eventually turn up.
