Did Wes Anderson's new film fail?

Time Contributor | Gummies bears

 Don't walk gently into that good night. 

Some movies are not destined to please everyone.

Even if it has obsessive-compulsive perfect composition, cute colors like macarons, and star-studded big name actors. But once the "story" is hidden behind the form, it is necessary to be prepared for it to cause controversy and bad reviews.

Ghost director Wes Anderson's new work is exactly that.

The Cannes score of 2.2 is obviously not impressive, and the 74% Rotten Tomatoes score is also the last of its entire works.

After The French Mission, are you ready to follow in Weiss's footsteps into a "poetic meditation on the meaning of life"?

"Planet City"

Ethereal absurdity

This is definitely Wes Anderson's weakest story movie ever.

At the beginning of the film, the audience was told through the mouth of the TV host: "Asteroid City" is a three-act drama, the characters are fictional, the text is hypothetical, and the events are fabricated.

Everything that is about to appear on the screen is designed to give audiences a better understanding of how modern theatrical productions work internally.

Obviously, this film is Anderson's "nested structure".

The brightly saturated candy-like color and the calm and restrained black and white tones distinguish the inside and outside of the play, while the host occasionally narrates in the form of a voiceover.

The whole movie can be seen as a filled hard candy with a double filling.

Hard candy is the center, and it is also the main body of the film - the drama "Asteroid City", which adopts a linear narrative.

It tells the story of 1955, in an abandoned American town, teenagers and parents from all over the country came to participate in the Young Astronomers Conference.

They present their research results and conduct academic discussions. All outstanding research achievements will be awarded and one person will be awarded a $5,000 scholarship.

There are typical Anderson characters in this story.

The male protagonist Auggie is a war correspondent with a fourteen-year-old son Woodrow and three young and lovely daughters.

But he was lost in grief.

Three weeks ago, his wife died of illness. Auggie didn't know how to tell the children about the bad news, so he had to carry his lover's ashes with him in a Tupperware crisper box, trying to find an opportunity to make an opening during the trip.

The heroine Mitch Campbell is a well-known female star, in order to accompany her daughter to the conference, she drove to Asteroid City.

She has a father, brother and uncle who have been violent to her since childhood, two failed marriages, and three children who are not close to her.

Countless people love her and love her comedy, but she thinks she is better suited to play an abused alcoholic character who ends up committing suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills in the bathtub.

She often paints cyan oil paint under her eyes, perhaps to remember the violence she has endured, or perhaps to confuse others and herself whether violence has really existed.

They are depressed, depressed, traumatized and unwilling to speak out.

Such flawed, contradictory, lonely adults are exactly what Wes Anderson is most happy to record with the camera.

Here, too, there is a typical Anderson twist.

At an ordinary astronomical observation meeting, aliens fell from the sky on a UFO and stole the asteroid for which the place is famous - a meteorite that fell in 3007 BC in full view.

As a result, the original researchers and enthusiasts became witnesses of extraterrestrial creatures.

The government quickly ordered that the people be isolated in Asteroid City, forbidden to disclose any information to the outside world, and receive a series of medical and psychological counseling.

 Everyone who understands it

However, the news is bound to leak. After people became more emotionally connected to each other as a result of the quarantine, the government suddenly announced the lifting of the quarantine order.

That night, the aliens returned to the meteorite. In the chaos, Woodrow was randomly selected to receive a scholarship check.

The next day, when Auggie woke up, everyone except his family was gone.

They ended up not burying their ashes in the beautiful back garden of the villa with the pool, in the company of her father. Instead, they followed their daughters' wishes and continued to leave them under the land of Asteroid City.

People gather, intersect, and then abruptly disperse.

Only meteorites that fell 5,000 years ago remain in place.

Audiences who try to find subtle and interesting stories like "The Grand Budapest Hotel" or "Isle of Dogs" in this film will be disappointed.

But for Time-Lord, what Wes Anderson offers this time is not a plot, but an experience.

As the creator of the show said in the second sandwich: "I want to create a scene where all the characters are gently and secretly brought into the most dreamy, deep sleep of their lives." ”

It's a play of falling asleep.

Then the dream woke up, and everyone was stunned.

Wes Anderson-esque experience

Like Anderson's other works, Asteroid City retains his unmistakable personal style.

The most recognizable are the fairytale tones that permeate the entire film, and the symmetrical composition that can be called obsessive-compulsive.

The bright and soft low-saturation colors make the desert town look sophisticated, clean and beautiful.

You can clearly realize that this is by no means a reality that should exist.

The film has also made it clear from the beginning: what you see in front of you is a landscape.

Whatever strange things happen here, the audience won't be surprised.

Because of this absurd and grotesque viewing experience, early through color in the heart of foreshadowing.

Extra-theatrical reality appears in simple black and white, and the director once again emphasizes the insurmountable boundary between creation and reality.

It is also for this reason that when the narrator mistakenly enters the shooting scene, it will look so strange and funny.

When Auggie's actors go straight out of the set and into the reality of the plot, the impact will be so strong.

Integrating movies in a nested form is also Wes Anderson's specialty.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is Wes Anderson's most acclaimed work and the title of a published book within the film.

The story in the book is also the past legend told by the boss when the writer himself was recuperating in the hotel.

The typical "matryoshka style" structure makes the stories that occur in different parts of the film can be presented to the audience in different chapters, and the viewing process is like reading a thrilling novel.

The subsequent animated film "Isle of Dogs" also followed this division.

Starting with "The French Mission", Anderson began to be more comfortable dividing the film in an unconventional way.

Because it tells the "story of the editorial office", the film adopts a block-block structure similar to a magazine column, revolving around the different types of reporting and writing processes of the three writers.

Three interesting column stories, supported by three independent short films, allow the audience to fully feel the charm of the magazine.

"Planet City" is in the form of drama splits, scene transformation and story division.

Inserted behind the stage, the real experiences of the directors, screenwriters, and actors help the audience understand how the plot and lines in the play are born, how the actors are chosen, and the original intention of the play.

The connection between internal and external structures is denser, which together supports the emotional experience that the entire film wants to convey to the audience.

Wes Anderson is an obvious master of emotional manipulation, he is adept at dealing with sadness in an absurdist comedy way, and using covert performances to avoid excessive emotional twists and expressions on the screen.

The surging emotions contained under the funny or calm interpretation are completely left to the audience to understand and digest by themselves.

Augie and Mitch are attracted to similar feelings of trauma and loneliness, but the emotional interaction between the two is entirely reflected in intermittent, expressionless conversations.

The only episode that can be called intense is that Auggie burns his hand with a pan during the dialogue.

As for Auggie's love and nostalgia for his wife, it is even less reflected in the play.

It is only when the actor walks backstage and confides in the director that he has lost himself in the role, and every night is as heartbroken as Auggie, that the audience suddenly realizes.

Then, a more brilliant scene happened -

The actor walked to the windowsill to breathe, and on the opposite windowsill, he met the actor who originally played his wife in the play.

The other party used the form of retelling the script to restore the deleted dialogue between Augie and his wife in a dream.

Her tone is cold and restrained, but when the snow falls between the Broadway buildings, every audience can experience the ultimate romance, helplessness and sadness.

"If you don't sleep, you won't wake up".

You can't come out of grief without experiencing it.

But sometimes, we tend to be immersed in dreams and do not want to wake up. Even knowing that this is negative and meaningless.

The accurate portrayal of this complex and chaotic human emotion is, in the eyes of Time Jun, the greatest significance of "Asteroid City".

dollhouse

"Asteroid City" is a new step forward for Wes Anderson in the field of experimental film.

But the set is not his laboratory, but a dollhouse where scenes and characters are dragged around.

Over time, we witnessed the expansion of this dollhouse little by little.

"The Great Papa Fox" has a purely linear narrative, a fairy tale about animals and humans fighting wits and courage.

The Grand Budapest Hotel adds a time dimension. The story of Gustavo, Mustafa and Agatha takes place here, and the unknown writer sits in a hotel in the distant future and listens to it.

Format size is the most intuitive way to distinguish between past and present.

The main body of "The French Mission" is three parallel magazine columns, but it is actually subdivided into "the author's TED talk", "the author's personal report", and "the author's TV interview retrospective".

Each story is presented in a variety of formats, depending on the authorship and the way it is told, allowing the audience to move freely between stop-motion animation, live-action film, and two-dimensional animation.

The latest Planet City is the most complex.

The inner and outer stories of the drama seem parallel, but they are intertwined and influence each other, forming a dreamlike movie-watching experience.

At this point, the audience no longer has to distinguish between illusory and real.

Like turning a kaleidoscope, just admire its versatility without delving into its prototypes and principles.

Of course, abandoning narrative and emphasizing feelings is a risky challenge.

Viewers will be drowsy from not knowing what to do, and the film's unsatisfactory ratings at the end confirm that the challenge was not actually a great success.

I hope that future Wes Anderson films can strike a better balance between expression and story.

After all, for most viewers, perfect symmetry and macaron tones are good for the eyes, but "what you say" is more important, isn't it?