Wes Anderson is once again playing to his strengths with Asteroid City, which hits cinemas later this year on June 23rd. And the first full trailer is as Andersonian as you’d expect.
The idiosyncratic auteur – famed for his surrealistic aesthetics, penchant for symmetry, and eccentric characters – will, for the first time in his career, deal with themes of space and aliens; roping in an all-star cast featuring the likes of Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Steve Carrell, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeff Goldblum, and more.
While the director was last seen tackling the precarious institution of journalism with 2021’s The French Dispatch, Anderson’s latest movie will be a dramatic (and no doubt highly visual) exploration of space as he and co-writer Roman Coppola tell the story of a Junior Stargazer and Space Cadet convention disrupted by “world-changing events.”
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The first full Asteroid City trailer is as distinctly stylish as you’d expect. From the colours and costumes to the neurotic way the characters interact, the preview illustrates how one family falls into the rhythms of a strange town in the middle of the desert, where seemingly random earthquakes and mushroom clouds don’t look out of place.
The family, fronted by an insular widower (Jason Schwartzman) and his four children, seem to be on their way to visit their grandfather (Tom Hanks) but instead break down in Asteroid City where one of the kids, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), becomes enamoured with the aforementioned convention organised to bring together students and parents from across the country for “fellowship and scholarly competition.”
To add to the impressively stacked cast, long-time Anderson collaborator Bill Murray was also supposed to star in Asteroid City but reportedly had to bow out after contracting COVID-19 before shooting began in 2021.
Watch the full Asteroid City trailer above. The film will be released on June 16 in select cinemas followed by a wider release on June 23.
