Asteroid City is set in Wes Anderson’s 1950s, as opposed to the ’50s he lived through. (He was born in 1969.) In The Grand Budapest Hotel, the filmmaker flipped through eras like lenses in an eye exam, putting the artist at a safe distance from his subject. The layering in this film does something else; it opens a conduit between past and present and their analogues: fiction and reality. Anderson seems self-possessed; he doesn’t hide behind his vision.
Perhaps the best way to get at it is to say that where Budapest was vertical, as in a monopoly, Asteroid City is horizontal. Anderson’s primary storyline, which involves gifted children, their parents, military brass, and scientific personnel encountering a U.F.O. in the Desert Southwest, and being placed under lockdown for it, is framed by its backstory, which casts that story as a play by a gay writer (Edward Norton) working with an austere ensemble that resembles the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, and this is framed by a making-of television documentary narrated by Bryan Cranston, doing his best Rod Serling—the voice of a cynical yet reassuring authority.
In effect, Anderson weaves together disparate strands of ’50s Americana, from highbrow (Method acting) to middle (anthology series) to low (flying saucers). He has explicitly set the story in the backyard of nuclear peril and in the same month (September 1955) as James Dean’s death: parallel truths that are stranger than fiction. All that makes these strands coherent is the very fact of his weaving. He salvages flotsam from a dream and the dream is collective nostalgia. The pieces fit together almost despite themselves.
Even if I didn’t expect it, I should have: Our hirsute cousins are more compelling, and, generally speaking, more convincingly embodied than we are in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I should’ve also anticipated its tendentious way of getting from Point A to Point Ape. An hour and a half waiting period between being a lower primate and becoming superhuman may seem like a brisk evolution to a Darwinian; but if you’re clocking in behind The Tree of Life, which breezed past eons in a fraction of that time, you know you’re in trouble. It’s not that this prequel is dull, exactly; for kids who haven’t seen the original Planet of the Apes (1968) or its sequels there may actually be some suspense. For most of us, however, the filmmakers had to take a different tack—they had to put us on the side of the underdogs by making their enemies (i.e., human beings) despicable. The genetically enhanced ape Caesar (a digital species-swap of Andy “Gollum” Serkis) who has suckled the milk of human kindness out of Will Rodman (James Franco)—a scientist who’s raised him to be something between a person and a pet—gets picked up by animal control and thrown into a zoo. A simian Shawshank, really. This passage sinks nearly to the level of PETA propaganda; Tom “Draco Malfoy” Felton (strapped with the ludicrous—and inappropriately heroic—name of Dodge Landon) is far from wizardly as the zookeeper / prison guard who uses an electronic cattle prod as his not-so-magic wand. He’s such a sadistic nitwit that the monkeys seem to outsmart him from the get-go; when they steal eugenic serum from Rodman’s lab, to escape and conquer the world, it’s an almost superfluous twist.
If the mad-scientist tragic inevitability doesn’t hook you as much as Shakespeare’s sometimes does, then maybe you’ll be sated by the way the insurgents break free of their monkey bars. The movie is sly only when it winks at its audience by nodding at its progenitor; but when one of the zookeepers sees Charlton Heston playing Moses on TV, it’s a genuinely clever joke. Caesar—the name really does flummox the historical allusion—doesn’t part the sea, but he does aim a fire hose at Dodge, who’s compromised by his own weapon of choice. The director, Rupert Wyatt, is inhumanly square when trucking purely in live-action (even Franco, stiff as a squiggle in 127 Hours and Howl, carries rigidity like a contagion); but he seems to have stored his imagination on a Mac hard drive. With Serkis as their ringleader, the motion-capture actors would’ve been impressive even without the state-of-the-art trimmings, covered extensively elsewhere; performers playing humans are rarely tasked with such gestural acting, and there’s certainly some kudos due to the techies who helped make their individuation possible. Predictably, the police called in to corner the apes on the Golden Gate Bridge are foolhardy, and their weapons technology is easily outmatched by the physical strength of their adversaries, and their cunning. (As well as by a convenient cumulus of Bay Area mist, and a little unconvincing writing: Since when are gorillas bullet-proof?) There are, however, two instances which, if they’d been sustained, might’ve made for a really stylish blockbuster: 1.) A shot of newspaper boys and joggers looking up at the palm-tree canopy when leaves start to fall unseasonably, and seeing the apes advancing; 2.) The sound of the apes trampling their way to Rodman’s slick corporate laboratory. The latter, a very simple special effect, might have been used to better advantage as a leitmotif for the apes’ rising action.
The plot has its own built-in simple special effect: its by-now familiar apocalyptic chic is compounded with a horrifying reversal of fortunes. If the only edge we humans have is our technical ingenuity—whether in the form of imagination or opposable thumbs—and we lose that to those species closer to nature who, by implication, we’ve mistreated, well—basically we’re screwed. There’s something primally unnerving about seeing a police cruiser wiped out by some refugees from the zoo—thwarting our so-called superiority with the very primitive bars we’ve caged them with. (It may be PETA propaganda, but they may have a point….) At the same time, however, this doomsday scenario puts us at a safe distance; to put it in the demotic: We’ve got 99 problems, but a baboon ain’t one. The prospect of nuclear war was the subtext back in ’68—it’s by no means incidental that Rod Serling, who’d already strolled through that territory many times before on The Twilight Zone, was one of that film’s writers. Nowadays, with our hopped up end-times expectations distended to the point of abstraction, it seems perverse that at our entertainments (not just our art and literature) we can sit back, relax, and take comfort in a mercifully quick bloodbath that leads to our everlasting oblivion. (If I had a crack team of researchers at my disposal—or at least a Netflix account—I’d love to see how much more often the world has ended in the past five-to-10 years of filmmaking than it did in the five-to-10 years prior.) I may be taking liberties with this movie’s climax, which makes it about as much a prequel to Contagion as it is to Planet of the Apes. But, even without subscribing whole-heartedly to the inevitability of man’s impending demise, I’m unsettled by the notion that we’ve become like terminal cancer patients envying gunshot-wound victims for the suddenness of their destruction.
Movie Monster 