The first trailer for Wes Anderson’s new film Asteroid City has just dropped, and if you like Wes Anderson, then you’re in luck: it looks like the most intensely ‘Wes Anderson’ Wes Anderson film Wes Anderson ever Wes Anderson’d. Flat compositions? Snappy, dry script? Young geeks finding love? It’s all here. Plus, this time, an alien invasion – and a certain Tom Hanks. In Anderson’s last movie, The French Dispatch, the vibe was Truffaut, Godard and Monsieur Hulot; this time it’s kitschy ’50s Americana, complete with desert diners, nuclear tests and eye-popping ice cream pastel colours everywhere. Check out the trailer here:
Jason Schwartzman is Mitch Campbell, a widower whose car breaks down in the arid but folksy Asteroid City while he’s driving his kids across the country. He calls his father-in-law – one Tom Hanks, with his Walt Disney moustache from Saving Mr. Banks stuck back on, and a gun tucked into his waistband – for help, and strikes up a friendship with an actor played by Scarlett Johansson. As they get closer, it turns out that something else is getting closer too: an extra-terrestrial with news of the universe to impart. “What’s out there?” asks one character. “The meaning of life. Maybe there is one!”
And, in the most Andersonian touch, the cast is absolutely absurd. You’ve got your Anderson favourites who’ve been there or thereabouts for the last 25 years: Jason Schwartzmann, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Tony Revolori, Edward Norton, Jeffrey Wright, Stephen Park and Jeff Goldblum. Then there are first-time live action Andersonites Scarlett Johansson, Bryan Cranston, and Liev Schreiber, who voiced characters in the Anderson’s second stop-motion feature Isle Of Dogs. All that, plus there’s a tranche of new faces: Hanks, Margot Robbie, Hope Davis, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau and Jake Ryan.
Frankly, nobody else makes a Wes Anderson movie quite like the man himself – so we’ll be turning up in pristine, pastel, perfectly symmetrical attire when Asteroid City hits UK cinemas on 23 June.