Every­thing we know so far about Wes Anderson’s Aster­oid City

Sum­mer tra­di­tion­al­ly her­alds the arrival of block­buster sea­son, but with it comes a coun­ter­point a lit­tle clos­er to the art­house. While the super­hero escapades and plan­et-oblit­er­at­ing CGI rage at peak deci­bel lev­els, the warm months also bring at least a cou­ple releas­es from brand-name auteurs who wield a sense of can’t‑miss occa­sion for a dif­fer­ent sub­set of view­er. Though these films can do quite well for them­selves at the box office, we may nonethe­less think of it as anti-block­buster season.

This year, that slot will be occu­pied by Wes Ander­son, whose lat­est film Aster­oid City has been slat­ed to crater cin­e­mas in June. This morn­ing brought the first trail­er for the hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed new trans­mis­sion from Plan­et Wes, and with a world pre­mière at Cannes all but guar­an­teed, what bet­ter time to take stock of all that’s cur­rent­ly known about this inter­galac­tic hyper­jump into whimsy?

Ander­son com­menced shoot­ing on the sprawl­ing ensem­ble piece in August 2021, tired of sit­ting on his hands dur­ing the thick of COVID and hav­ing long since com­plet­ed The French Dis­patch. The small Span­ish sub­urb of Chinchón, fifty kilo­me­ters out­side of Madrid, stood in for a desert town in the Amer­i­can South­west that sprang up around a space rock that crash-land­ed there years before.

In this expanse of sand and sun, ​‘Aster­oid Day’ takes place to com­mem­o­rate the day the mete­orite struck, as Jason Schwartz­man​‘s put-upon wid­ow­er and his chil­dren find them­selves strand­ed en route to vis­it their late mother’s father (Tom Han­ks, mak­ing his Wes debut). At the same time, actress Midge Camp­bell (Scar­lett Johans­son) rolls into town, and gets some rather damn­ing praise from local gos­sip Hope Davis – all this, just as the town’s Junior Stargazer/​Space Cadet con­ven­tion appears to have made con­tact with an extra-ter­res­tri­al of the green-glow­ing variety.

Our first glimpse at Aster­oid City reveals the film’s star-stud­ded cast – beyond Schwartz­man, Johans­son and Han­ks (who received top billing), we get a look at Jef­frey Wright as a mil­i­tary man kick­ing off the fes­tiv­i­ties, Maya Hawke as a school­teacher, Steve Car­rell in a snazzy visor/​bolo tie/​mustache ensem­ble, plus Jake Ryan as Schwartzman’s son Woodrow, a cou­ple of years after he stole the show in Bo Burn­ham​‘s Eighth Grade. And that still leaves a big ques­tion mark over the roles played by Matt Dil­lon, Tony Revolori, Til­da Swin­ton (could she be the alien?), Adrien Brody, Edward Nor­ton, Bryan Cranston, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Mar­got Rob­bie, and Jeff Gold­blum, among oth­ers. Sure­ly there’s more afoot than we’ve been hipped to thus far.

Ander­son has fit­ted his sig­na­ture hyper-com­posed style to the desert set­ting in some clever ways vis­i­ble from this first glance: the unre­lent­ing sun flat­tens his deep-focused frames into some­thing clos­er to a paint­ing or a post­card, with straight, severe lines and taste­ful­ly dis­tressed col­ors. Wes being Wes, how­ev­er, some things nev­er change. We still have fraught famil­ial rela­tion­ships between striv­ing sons and bro­ken fathers, a dead­pan sense of visu­al humor reliant on dol­ly shots that slide per­fect­ly into place, a sound­track full of exca­vat­ed obscurities.

What’s not clear is the big­ger game here — The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, and The French Dis­patch found Ander­son on an antifas­cism kick, cloak­ing some point­ed polit­i­cal mate­r­i­al in his metic­u­lous­ly arranged sto­ry­book worlds. Will the arrival of this alien pave the way for state­ments about human­i­ty, or the response of the state? Word on the street is that part of the film takes place with­in the cos­mos, a turn that this trail­ers keeps close to its vest, if true.

As long­time LWLies read­ers will know, we’re big fans of Wes, so we’ll be sure to keep our tele­scope fixed on this one. Until the Cannes pro­gram announce­ment, like those Junior Stargaz­ers before us, we’ll cast our eyes to the night sky and won­der what won­ders may await us.

Aster­oid City comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 16 June and the UK on 23 June.