 If you're a Big Wes Anderson fan and you celebrate his entire body of work, the entire collection, go out, watch Asteroid City, have yourself a great time. You don't need to hear from me about it. Now, if you are someone that's on the fence, maybe you liked Royal Ten and Bombs, maybe you liked the Life Aquatic or Rushmore, I'm a big fan of Rushmore myself, but you're not fully invested. You want to like his stuff more, but you're disappointed every single time. Well, now you and I maybe have something more in common because that's where I'm at with the guy. I saw Asteroid City, I gave it a chance, and I'm going to give you my review on it spoiler-free. Please join me. Full disclosure, I was going to do this review in the style of a Wes Anderson film, meaning like hold up a microphone and just awkwardly stand here and talk once in a while, do artsy shots, different camera angles, and then I realized YouTube doesn't pay me enough for that crap. So we're going to do by the book's basic stuff. And that's the opposite of what I love about Wes Anderson. He's not formulaic. He does things his way. And his way seems to get quirkier and more off the wall every single time. You're going to hear critics use words like irreverent, wondrous, wildly different, full blown Wes Anderson. And these are all words for sure. And I would say, yeah, they do make sense here because Asteroid City is full on headstrong Wes Anderson for better and in my case, worse. Let's start with the pros. As always, stellar cast. You have Tom Hanks, you have Scarlett Johansson, Scar Joe for short, as I call her, and I think people started saying that after I did. Jason Schwartzman, Brian Cranston, Edward Norton, Maya Hawk, I guess, for the kids. And a bunch of others I didn't even notice in the trailer and won't say in case you want to go out and see this and not have those reveals spoiled. A lot, a lot of good actors showing up and they all have quirky, cutesy tendencies and speak and act the same way. It's fun and a little bit tiring after a while. Asteroid City is an hour and 44 minutes long. It feels closer to two and a half hours. This thing does not move fast. It takes its time. It slowly builds. It also presents itself in play structure, meaning we have a movie inside of a movie here, folks. And that alone is going to turn off a huge swath of general audience goers. In fact, I saw this movie solo because no one else would go with me to a Wes Anderson film. And I was one of maybe 15 people in the theater, two couples. They left. They walked out halfway through this film. It's like they read each other's minds and decided let's get up and leave at the same time. Totally different sides of the theater. They just never came back. And as I was watching and it was closing in around the hour 20 mark, I was thinking to myself, I could leave and like not care at all. The story is not the type that's really pulling you in. We don't have a Shawshank redemption here or a seven or something that's really profound and impactful and heartbreaking and all those other emotions. This is just quirky. It's quirky through and through. Now there is a topic. There is subject matter. It's a little abstract. And the movie acknowledges the abstractness of it. Abstractness. Is that a word? It's Wes Anderson. We'll make it one. But it doesn't really bother going into anything particularly. It's more just these are some different types of people that all have their own struggles and baggage. And they're all trying to find their purpose. And maybe they will in Astrid City or maybe they won't or maybe it's all irrelevant. Who cares? That's the message. Visually speaking, this movie is stunning. It takes place in the 1950s. The location is very fun and Wes Anderson knows this. He loves what he made. And he takes the time to show us every little nook and cranny. And the opening is really terrific. I thought, man, we are in for something special. And as it kept going, I thought, man, this was special at one point. Now it's kind of losing me until the ending when I inevitably was like bummer. But he's doing some really great panning and dolly shots constantly in this thing. Going from the repair shop to the little cafe. The location, if it wasn't obvious, is Astrid City. That's the name of this little small rinky dink town in the middle of nowhere in a desert where an asteroid came down, caused a big crater in the ground. Wes Anderson's also having fun with different aspect ratios. He's having fun with black and white and then into color. I mean, the whole thing feels like it's shot inside of a road runner cartoon as well. The colors are very poppy. You got the desert, of course. The motif is all there. I don't know. It just, something was a miss for me. And I think it's the fact that it's so herky jerky. There's no compelling narrative. There's no through line really to this thing. It's different acts of a play. It's showing the struggles of actors. It's stuff we've all seen a bunch of times before, but then it's jumbled together in this little pot luck. And while some of the food provided was very tasty, the overall meal, not that great. All right. Well, those are my thoughts on Astrid City. I'd love to hear from you. You, a big Wes Anderson fan, you're looking forward to this one. Maybe you already saw it. Let me know in the comments below. Please like the video if you got something out of this. And if you got more than one thing out of it, maybe think about subscribing. And as I post tons of movie content each and every week, I'd love to have you stick around. And hopefully, if you do decide to subscribe, you'll come back and I can talk to you some more in another video. That would be wonderful.