Wes Anderson and Steven Spielberg use sci-fi the same way, for the same reasons

polygon.com:

Deep in its closing credits, the new Wes Anderson movie Asteroid City features an unexpected name. In the “special thanks” section toward the end of the roll, listed alongside Anderson friends and past collaborators like Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, is Steven Spielberg, the most commercially successful director of all time. These two filmmakers seem pretty far apart: Spielberg is best known for making popular entertainment, whether in the form of thrilling, fantastical adventures or sobering journeys through 20th-century horrors. Anderson is known for the meticulous construction of deadpan-comic worlds. With Asteroid City, though, their connection becomes clearer: They both use science fiction to explore the loss and melancholy of fractured families.

Anderson isn’t known as a sci-fi or fantasy director — but then, those are no longer Spielberg’s principal genres, either. Beyond any cracks about his movies seeming to take place on another planet entirely, Anderson’s last overt science fiction film was 2018’s dystopian stop-motion story Isle of Dogs, while 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel contains elements of fantasy and alternate history, and 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou features fantastical, fictional creatures. Asteroid City likely credits Spielberg because it takes some inspiration from 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg’s first real sci-fi movie: When an alien ship makes contact with humans in the American desert in Asteroid City, the event somewhat mimics Close Encounters.

Close Encounters famously ends with a journey that Spielberg has since mused he wouldn’t have been comfortable with later in his career — Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) definitively leaves his wife and children,