9/10 Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch was the crown jewel of a late-2021 explosion of pandemic-delayed works from name directors, but now at what appears to be the peak of his career, he didn’t stop working during the COVID-19 crisis, and so we have “Asteroid City,” another pandemic movie from the American auteur, this one made during and directly confronting the pandemic.
1955- Viewers are treated to a filmed performance of the fictional play “Asteroid City.” In the play, five children and their families descend on Asteroid City, a ghost town near a nuclear testing site in the Mojave Desert known for its meteorite crater, where they are to receive awards from the military for various science projects. The play mostly focuses on war photojournalist Augie Steenbeck [Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman)], who has not told his children of their mother’s death three weeks prior, who begins a relationship with Hollywood sex symbol Midge Campbell [Mercedes Ford (Scarlett Johansson)]. At the end of Act I, the grand awards ceremony in the crater is crashed by an alien [uncredited (Jeff Goldblum)], who drops in to steal the meteorite and traps everyone there in military quarantine as the U.S. government tries to stop any of this from getting out.
Between acts, a television host (Bryan Cranston) gives us an oral history of the performance and its writer, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton).
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