© Universal Pictures & Focus FeaturesThere's quirk and then, there's Wes Anderson quirk.
For 27 years, the Texan has been specialising in visually vibrant, star studded comic tales about eccentrics.
During that period, he's worked with Gene Hackman, Bruce Willis, Meryl Streep, Christoph Waltz, Irrfan Kahn, Natalie Portman, Ben Stiller, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Wilkinson and George Clooney.
However along the way he has assembled his own cinematic repertory company whose members he calls upon from time to time depending on the project.
Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, Adrien Brody, Anjelica Huston, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Saoirse Ronan, Bob Balaban, Tony Revolori, Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton, Owen Wilson, Lea Seydoux, F Murray Abraham and Brian Cox all fall into this category.
At their best, Anderson's movies are a laugh out loud fusion of Monty Python, Woody Allen and the Coen Brothers.
The humour is often visual but it is also stubbornly nerdy.
Now he has notched up an 11th motion picture.
© Universal Pictures & Focus Features'Asteroid City' is a UFO movie wrapped up in a story about a Broadway play.
The narrator is Bryan Cranston's unnamed television host, although this being an Anderson film it is not a conventional narration.
In a throwback to the early days of television, Cranston's character is there to tell the story of how 'Asteroid City' was created on Broadway.
In these sequences in black and white, Edward Norton is the playwright responsible for writing 'Asteroid City' Conrad Earp and Adrien Brody is its respected director Schubert Green.
However Anderson flits between the behind the scenes tale and an imagining of the play itself, shooting the latter as if it were a 1950s drama on the plains of the American Southwest.
We don't quite know the exact location - it could be Arizona, Nevada or New Mexico.
However this is how an audience member attending a performance of Earp's play may imagine it.
Asteroid City isn't a city.
© Universal Pictures & Focus FeaturesIt's a one horse town, with a motel, a diner, a garage and a scientific research institute.
It has the remains of a motorway flypass that was barely begun.
The motel has vending machines including one which makes perfect martinis and another that sells local real estate, giving deeds to plot of lands that are about the size of half a tennis court.
The town is famous for a huge crater that was left 1,000 years before by an asteroid and it is also the host of an annual astronomy convention for teenagers that honours up and coming scientific talent.
© Universal Pictures & Focus FeaturesJason Schwartzman's war photographer Augie Steinbeck arrives in town in a station wagon with his intellectual son Jake Ryan's Woodrow and three young daughters, Ella, Gracie and Willan Farris' Andromeda, Pandora and Cassiopeia.
Their car has barely made it to Asteroid City and not long after their arrival, they are informed by Matt Dillon's mechanic Hank that it isn't going to make it out of the town after the convention that Woodrow is participating in.
Augie telephones his father-in-law, Tom Hanks' Stanley Zak to come collect the three girls as planned.
However we also discover that he has been hiding from the kids the dreadful news that their mom passed away three weeks earlier.
© Universal Pictures & Focus FeaturesAs the Steinbecks settle into their tiny motel chalet, other scientific prodigies and their families are checked in by Steve Carrell's manager.
They include Grace Edwards' Dinah Campbell and her famous Hollywood actress mother, Scarlet Johansson's Midge.
There's also Ethan Josh Lee's Ricky Cho and his father, Stephen Park's Roger, Sophia Lillis' Shelley Borden and her mom, Hope Davis' Sandy, Aristou Meehan's Clifford Kellog and his martini quaffing dad, Liev Schreiber's JJ.
A busload of school kids also turn up under the supervision of Maya Hawke's teacher June Douglas.
Rupert Friend's friendly singing cowboy, Montana seems to be passing through with some musical chums played by Jarvis Cocker, Seu Jorge, Pere Mallen and Jean Yves-Lozach.
He catches June's eye as she tries to keep the children in check.
Overseeing the astronomy convention is Jeffrey Wright's General Grif Gibson who has been asked to hand out a prize for the best invention from one of the five prodigies.
These range from jet packs and a ray gun to Woodrow's machine which can project images onto the moon.
Joined by Tilda Swinton's local research scientist Dr Hickenlooper and Bob Balaban's unnamed executive from the Larkings Corporation, they arrange a late night stargazing session in the asteroid crater.
But when events take a sensational return with an unexpected alien encounter, the town is immediately put into lockdown as the military consults the White House about what it should do.
But will word of the alien sighting get out?
'Asteroid City' is a typically vibrant looking movie from Anderson, with some outstanding cinematography by Robert Yeoman, a frequent collaborator with Anderson who has worked with the director before on 'Rushmore,' 'The Royal Tenenbaums,' 'The Darjeeling Limited,' 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' and 'The French Dispatch'.
Milena Canonero's costumes, Adam Stockhausen's production design, Stephane Cressend's art direction and Kris Moran's set decoration is also superb - brilliantly capturing 1950s Americana in the desert sequences and the grimy feel of Actors Studio New York in the making of the play sequences.
Anderson cleverly depicts New York in black and white, moving to full blown colour for the Asteroid City story.
Like 'The French Dispatch,' he boldly plays around with narrative and that is to be commended.
You also get a sense that he is drawing from the contemporary experience of shooting a movie during COVID, with all its restrictions, in this tale of a town forced to go into lockdown by circumstances beyond their control.
© Universal Pictures & Focus FeaturesHowever like its predecessor, 'Asteroid City' is a bit of a sensory overload.
There's loads going on to the point that it feels like Anderson just has too many nice looking, spinning plates.
Its star studded cast and dual narrative structure is ambitious but it sometimes gets in the way of the rollout of the story.
The hopping between narratives can be distracting and it contributes to a sense that some of the film's accomplished cast members being criminally underused.
© Universal Pictures & Focus FeaturesThe humour doesn't quite land in the way you might hope, falling into the "moderately amusing with the occasional belly laugh" category when you would like to see a lot more belly laughs.
As for the performances, it's really a mixed bag.
On the plus side, Schwatzman, Johansson, Schreiber, Ryan, Edwards, Swinton, Wright, Friend and Hawke are allowed to dazzle in the Asteroid City strand of the story.
Unfortunately Hanks, Carrell, Davis, Balaban, Dillon and Tony Revolori as General Gibson's right hand man are given roles that have little substance and you feel they are being sorely neglected.
© Universal Pictures & Focus FeaturesSimilarly in the Broadway sequences, Schwartzman, Brody, Cranston and Margot Robbie, who is in a scene set on stairways outside two theatres, are given the opportunity to shine.
However Norton, Jeff Goldblum, Hong Chau and Willem Dafoe as a Lee Strasberg style acting coach either never get the chance to ignite or their appearances are just too fleeting.
There are some nods to the Looney Tunes cartoon 'Roadrunner,' Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' and also Steven Spielberg's 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'.
However the biggest nod is to Tim Burton's underappreciated 1996 alien invasion comedy 'Mars Attacks!' which also revelled in the quirky.
© Universal Pictures & Focus FeaturesBut that nod only serves to underline why 'Asteroid City' disappoints.
Burton's equally star studded movie brilliantly balanced its quirky humour with out and out slapstick and it executed it really well.
All you have in 'Asteroid City' is quirkiness and after a while quirkiness can get tiresome.
'Mars Attacks!' had spite as it poked fun at American institutions but it also had heart.
© Universal Pictures & Focus FeaturesThat is missing from 'Asteroid City' which has a slightly sneering detachment to it.
When Anderson is at his best with films like 'Rushmore,' 'The Darjeeling Limited' and 'The Grand Budapest Hotel,' he has characters you can empathise with, in spite of their many flaws.
The narratives of those film also seem a lot more focused, less likely to wander off.
Oddly for a 105 minute film, 'Asteroid City' could do with some trimming or, at least, some remodelling of the story.
© Universal Pictures & Focus FeaturesThe black and white behind the scenes tale of how 'Asteroid City' add little to the film - bar one revelation.
You feel they could easily have been sacrificed for a much sharper film just about the UFO encounter.
It is easy to understand why jokes that mostly raise a wistful smile could irritate some viewers who may detect more than a hint of smugness from the film.
Anderson's wacky They Might Be Giants approach to cinema can be a real joy at times.
© Universal Pictures & Focus FeaturesThose moments of joy, however, are few and far between in 'Asteroid City'.
Unfortunately, this film is destined to sit in the lower half of the Anderson league table.
While's good that he continues to stretch himself as a filmmaker, he still needs to be careful.
Playing with narrative convention is all well and good but if it becomes a distraction from the telling of a story, maybe it's time to go back to understanding why your previous films were much more effective.
('Asteroid City' opened in UK and Irish cinemas on June 23, 2023)
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