Asteroid City proves Wes Anderson can’t be copied, by AI or anyone else

polygon.com:

This review of Asteroid City comes from the movie’s premiere screening at the Cannes Film Festival. Expect more on the movie as we get closer to the film’s theatrical opening in June.

Film lovers have never been in danger of mistaking a Wes Anderson movie for anybody else’s work, but he’s only become more distinctive with age. As both a storyteller and a visual stylist, Anderson produces hyper-decorative, deceptively poignant work that’s instantly recognizable. It’s also eye-pleasing enough to have spawned fashion trends, photography books, hit Instagram accounts, and a recent wave of AI-generated art and lifestyle TikTok parodies that offer definitive proof that there’s a huge distance between artistry and algorithm. But even with his trademark twee visual style turned into a ubiquitous part of popular culture, Asteroid City proves there’s still nobody quite like Wes Anderson.

Anderson has been making grand, jubilant, aching, profound films for decades now, but he’s moved away from the naturalistic, heart-on-sleeve sensibility of Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums. He’s headed to the next level as a filmmaker by focusing on visually opulent flights of fancy. His latest movies — from the Matryoshka doll-nested neo-baroque architecture of The Grand Budapest Hotel to the sparkling jeu d’esprit of The French Dispatch — move away from the modern day and into bygone eras, adding on an extravagant, disarmingly sincere profusion of visual detail.

Asteroid City, his 11th feature, is as dazzlingly ambitious as those movies in its re-creation of the midcentury American Southwest, circa 1955. The desert town of Asteroid City was named for a massive meteor crater and a nearby celestial observatory. It’s a tiny