If you don't want that in a film, look elsewhere. So no, this film won't handhold, and it's probably best suited to diehard Wes Anderson fans who'll watch this multiple times, do background reading, and at last extract the full value and punchline the film is getting at. Scenes in Asteroid City, divvied into acts of a play, aren't apparent enough to make sense from intuitive viewing alone, leaving the cinema-goer with the assignment of having to unpick and piece together an underlying latticework of allegory and metaphor.
Instead, a TV series might've given Anderson more scope to get across his message. The film (unfortunately) reads more like a book or catalogue of short poems than a motion picture, it's as if the script and plot sounded incredible on paper but proved hard to get onto the cinema in this outing, Anderson's creative ambition is perhaps too much for cinema, and budgets, to accommodate - just as most well-written books notoriously can't be fully realised on the big screen. A range of cartoonish characters are played by a gold-plated ultra-cast (Hanks, Johansson, Swinton, Robbie, Cranston, Carell, Goldblum) that holler, gesticulate, and wax Americanisms and charming idiosyncrasies. There's an iridescent Kodak-coloured chop suey of philosophy, aphorisms, and snippets of ideas going on here in the proverbial bowl of Asteroid City. And perhaps, a dash of Anderson's self-indulgence in what could be seen as a pet project, to an extent.
Indeed, Wes Anderson's latest offbeat foray into whimsical contemplative existential dread and man's search for meaning is a portrait of a self-contained microcosm of human society - an allegory for human mundanity, excellence, plight, awe, and wonder all bundled into one. It's cinematic poetry with a high barrier for entry.
Anderson presents a range of human experience and leaves the rest open to interpretation. This is a film that perhaps hasn't quite got the impact of its titular asteroid.
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