Asteroid City 4K 2023 2160p WEB-DL

The action takes place in 1955. In a remote town near the desert come together students from different schools and their parents to participate in a contest of astronomers. Suddenly the area is closed off due to a meteorite fall.

Asteroid City 4K Review
"Asteroid City" - is already the third Wes Anderson film to be included in the Cannes program. "Kingdom of the Full Moon" and "The French Herald" also premiered on the Côte d'Azur. The latter film so exhausted both critics, audiences and casual passersby that the unconditional love for the director's puppet vignettes was replaced by fatigue and irritation: "Asteroid City" is blamed in absentia for self-repetition and form prevailing over meaning. The conclusions will follow logical: Wes Anderson made an unusual picture for himself, but not so much to regain the sympathy of those who loyalty to the director's handwriting lost.

"Asteroid City," like "The Grand Budapest Hotel," is a multicomponent construction: the host of the late-night TV show (Bryan Cranston) - a Rod Serling in a perfectly fitted jacket - invites the audience to plunge into the course of the production of a play about a marvelous place abandoned among the sands. When the monochrome introduction of playwright (Edward Norton) and director (Adrien Brody) recedes, "The Twilight Zone" is flooded with the ochre color of Asteroid City's windswept pastoral. Cold War, 1955: the crater left by the fall of a celestial body becomes the center of attraction for the "young stargazers" - high school inventor-experts fascinated by the secrets of the universe - and the desert around them becomes a testing ground for the atomic bomb and other government experiments. Somewhere between creative and destructive discoveries, the sorrows of the little people who find themselves in the quarantine zone (literal and empathic) are stuck.

The first thing that surprises me is that the film is almost devoid of the pulse of movement and the jaunty chords of music. The air in Asteroid City is saturated with midday heat, 50's chanteys sound only background from radios, and the title theme is punctuated by interludes of TV blocks. Life in the town, if not stopped, then put on pause: the languid languor of waiting is interrupted only by conversations about the existence of UFOs, lectures professor (Tilda Swinton) and unhurried revelations of war photographer Auggie Steinbeck (Jason Schwartzman) and actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson, who played Janet Leigh in the biopic of the master of sapsensa, remains faithful to Hitchcock's ladies and Anderson). Auggie has lost his wife and three weeks later must inform his children that mom is gone.

Before "Asteroids," Andersen's most painful film was perceived as "Train to Darjeeling": three brothers set off on a spontaneous and chaotic journey across India a year after their father's death. Sixteen years have passed, and Wes, instead of rebirth, shedding the ballast of heavy baggage and moving selflessly forward on the rails of life, suggests stopping and living the loss in mental stagnation. When the wife is dead, even atomic bomb blasts are nothing more than static on the radio waves of "sadness." According to Auggie, it's easier for atheists to believe not in heaven and hell, but that those who have left us are left somewhere in the stars (almost like in The Lion King, minus the aliens). At least that's what he himself was told as a child. Forcing the motley audience to freeze, Anderson choruses a camera that circles between static figures, circling silhouettes and capturing miniature scenes-incidents in the distant background. Unobtrusively and as if by accident, somewhere between the chatter, smooth transitions and close encounters of the third, first and whatever degree, the director sadly suggests that the most important intimacy is doomed to end in loss, but separation is not so terrible if you want to believe in something else.

Conspiracy, government conspiracies, aliens, religion, the laws of logic, the mysteries of the universe, the fear of nuclear war - everyone is looking for their own pill to numb the pain and want to see something more than an abandoned gas station in a town in the middle of "nowhere." As the shot leaves Asteroid City and falls into layers of meta-dimensionality, Wes confesses, somehow doomed and with bitter irony, that his picture constructions (the same piece from the TV show) that everyone is so sick of are also anesthesia. "The Twilight Zone" isn't just about visitors from other planets and a haven for monsters in the dark, but a gray area within that is gripping even in the sunniest town where no shadows fall.

"You can't wake up if you're awake": sometimes everyone needs to squeeze tight, fall into slumber, believe that the truth is somewhere nearby, and quarantine themselves from reality. And then come back.