I’m becoming increasingly convinced that Wes Anderson is the most successful con man working in Hollywood today, and Asteroid City, for me, only doubles down on this idea.

Boasting an incredible roster of contemporary A-list stars, from Anderson regulars like Willem Dafoe and Jeff Goldblum to the likes of Margot Robbie, Tom Hanks, Steve Carrell and Maya Hawke, all making their debut performances in front of Anderson’s camera, Asteroid City offers another installment of the auteur director’s now trademark ‘quirky’ dollhouse aesthetic.

Doubling down on the story-within-a-story, narration-within-narration framework of The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch, this latest offering combines the heavily promoted narrative about an Alien visitation in the titular town of Asteroid City, with a meta-narrative revealing that this close encounter is actually a play of the same name, penned by Edward Norton’s playwright Conrad Earp, and starring the same actors we see in the full-colour segments. Like those aforementioned films, when this narrative conceit is combined with the picturebook stylistics of his mise-en-scene and the often monotone delivery of every actor performing on screen, Anderson seems determined to aggressively foreground the fabrication and falsehoods of his storytelling. Pitched somewhere between Cary Grant’s fast-talking screwball comedy persona (see: His Girl Friday) and an arty teenager’s self-written soliloquy about ennui and grief (hey, we’ve all been there), this Andersonian archetype amounts to little more than a prop used to deliver the director’s own idiosyncratic witticisms, with little nuance or distinction between any of the dozens of characters seen on screen – men or women, adults or teenagers, military officials or hotel managers.

At this point in his filmography, I’m personally finding the Anderson schtick wearing incredibly thin, with the ensemble cast of Asteroid City being almost entirely wasted on a story that is little more than self-serving brand management. Prepping for this review, I looked back to my thoughts on The French Dispatch to remind myself of how I responded to that effort, only to find a similar sentiment.

Hell, if Anderson is keen to copy and paste his own work, I may as well do the same.

Like The French Dispatch, so much of Asteroid City ‘amounts to little more than weightless artifice for the sake of his now instantly recognisable ‘style’. I do wonder what the actors themselves are getting out of their roles – Moss, Seydoux, McDormand Goldblum, Robbie and Swinton are criminally underused to the point where you wonder why they signed up for what was at best bit-player cameos? One suspects – to be part of a Wes Anderson movie! – of course. But an ensemble cast is only of interest if they have something to do.‘

I did find myself chuckling at a fair few visual gags and witty punchlines. I’m not saying that the director is incapable of great work, simply that he now seems to be resting on his laurels, having established a default formula around the time of Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, opting since for the path of least cinematic resistance. But where is the passion of Rushmore, or the emotional sincerity of The Darjeeling Limited‘s central family drama? How about the formal experimentation of his stop-motion films Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs?

Asteroid City just seems to further the case for Anderson’s artistic stagnation. Unwilling or unable to try something new, he seems to be running on autopilot, recycling his mise-en-scene, cinematography, and favourite collaborators ad nauseum. Consciously or not, the creators (fans?) behind the recent social media trend of recreating Anderson’s signature aesthetic readily highlight the director’s now standard cookie-cutter approach, distilling the director’s work down to an easily emulated visual aesthetic (planimetric composition, pastel colours, quaint architecture). Hinting at his distaste for the trend (a sense that the conman fears he is being found out, perhaps?), Anderson responded to these videos by stating:

“I’m very good at protecting myself from seeing all that stuff If somebody sends me something like that I’ll immediately erase it and say, ‘Please, sorry, do not send me things of people doing me.’ Because I do not want to look at it, thinking, ‘Is that what I do? Is that what I mean?’ I don’t want to see too much of someone else thinking about what I try to be because, God knows, I could then start doing it.”

I’m sorry Wes, you’ve been ‘doing it’ for a while now…