Until the film’s final scene, I would have said that this is, surprisingly, Wes Anderson’s most anti-capitalist film: the contrast between the coldly metallic heavy industrialisation of Boggis, Bunce, and Bean’s farms and the warm autumnal palette of the animals’ home; Mr. Fox’s (George Clooney) embrace of his wild animal nature. The last shot, a long shot of a huge big-box supermarket, complicates this reading. Has Mr. Fox in some sense been domesticated by neoliberal convenience? Is capitalist normativity just a different kind of fox-trap for him?

I remembered this as the slightest of Wes Anderson’s live-action scripts with Roman Coppola, most notable for the extreme precision of the film’s Andersonian clockwork diorama world and evocativeness of music and visuals. Yet I was moved to tears by the scene between Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) and Lt. Nescaffier (Stephen Park) which exemplifies all the film’s themes—which I’d either forgotten or missed the first time—around loneliness and yearning for human connection. That brief moment of connection between a foreign immigrant and an expatriate homosexual both “[s]eeking something missing, missing something left behind” and hoping to “find what eluded us in the places we once called home”.

Like the main characters, this film has a charm and a sincerity that are both beguiling even while it settles into a diffuseness that feels a little frustrating. There’s a good mix of Coen Brothers’ postmodern sensibility with Godard’s rebellious young man archetype but this also takes on some of the worst qualities of both in its sense of youthful aimlessness. It didn’t really work for me but it’s interesting to see the embryonic elements of Wes Anderson’s aesthetic steadily emerge particularly in the sequences reshot from the short film version.

This short’s conciseness and energy work better to convey the themes than the feature.

In an essay for the Criterion Collection Blu-ray, Isabel Folger writes that “Moonrise Kingdom shows that with the right people in your life, you won’t feel misunderstood.” There are some emotional moments that are so powerful that they justify entire films about them. MOONRISE KINGDOM is about that moment that you are seen—truly seen—for the first time. When Sam (Jared Gilman) sees Suzy (Kara Hayward), it doesn’t matter that they’ve never fit in before, that they’ve been labelled “emotionally disturbed” or “very troubled”. They find that one other person and suddenly fit just right.

The Titan submersible incident prompted a response by James Cameron highlighting his approach to underwater exploration. I’m struck by the contrast between Wes Anderson’s almost childlike reverence for undersea explorers in the outdated model of Jacques Costeau, expressed in THE LIFE AQUATIC and RUSHMORE, and Cameron’s much more masculine-coded urge to conquer the depths harnessing advanced technology for his pursuit. Anderson’s view of someone who would explore the ocean is far more melancholic with Zissou cast as a tragic figure: not a hero, but someone ineluctably human and flawed, deeply so. Ultimately both Zissou and Cameron must face the same question when confronted with the immense indifference of the oceanic world beyond them, “I wonder if it remembers me?”

Found footage of a Czech soap where the real story hides behind clever edits eliding dark truths.

At the end of the film, the Newborn is violently sucked through a tiny hole into Earth’s upper atmosphere. This film feels like trying to suck the Alien franchise through a much-diminished perspective to become a generic and misogynistic blockbuster. Most of the blame must lie with Whedon’s script which firmly shifts the sexual locus of the franchise from ALIEN’s ‘monstrous feminine’ to the most mundane implementation of male gaze from the perspective of a teenage boy. Ripley’s new ‘sexy but threatening’ persona completely disregards what worked about the character in the previous films. A script that doesn’t work with a director who does not fit the Alien franchise.

SLIVER wants to be about voyeurism, surveillance, and power. But gesturing towards themes while not saying anything substantive about them is not enough for thematic resonance. There’s a kernel of an idea in the sequence where Carly (Sharon Stone) watches from the surveillance room as a teenager reveals her father’s abuse of her and then Carly sees the two in the elevator. Knowing the secrets of your neighbours but being unable to take action because of how you know about them is interesting. But the film isn’t interested in that and gets tangled in narrative convolutions while being about as deep as THE DARK KNIGHT on actual surveillance.

ASTEROID CITY serves as something of an artistic statement for this period of Wes Anderson’s filmmaking, overtly discussing existential themes around meaning and, in particular, finding meaning through art that emphasise Anderson’s complicating of modernism and postmodernism. When Adrien Brody’s director character says that the meaning doesn’t matter, he’s talking through the fourth wall to viewers alienated by Anderson’s idiosyncratic aesthetics. ASTEROID CITY tells the viewer not only how to read it but how to read all of Anderson’s work by openly stating that how the viewer approaches his films is critical to how the works produce sincerity with and through their ironic postmodern conceits.