"Asteroid City" is Wes Anderson through and through - for all the good, and this case mostly the bad, that that implies. The movie opens with the host of a black-and-white TV show (Bryan Cranston, wasted in this very limited role) telling us about a play called "Asteroid City." We see parts of the play (on an exceptionally stagey set, even by Anderson's standards), we see pieces of the making of the play, we see bits with the playwright (Edward Norton), etc. Not only is the setting deliberately stagey, but the camera moves in a way specifically designed to call attention to itself. Pans are sudden, fast, and linear. Turns are fast, and precisely 90 degrees. Etc.

What really sinks the whole production is Anderson's ongoing efforts to distance the audience from the actors and their characters: they state their issues out loud (rather than letting us discover them), with little emotion. Anderson has always liked surrealist movies that attempt to walk the line between comedy and pain: his finest example is "The Royal Tenenbaums," which is absurd, heart-breaking, and hysterically funny. It was a deft balancing act between farce and tragedy, and any mis-step would have led to failure. Yet he walked the line perfectly. His film after "The Royal Tenenbaums" was "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," which (I thought) stumbled all over both sides of that line, and as a result completely failed to hit its mark. This isn't as bad as "The Life Aquatic," but it's complex and uninvolving and so fails to include its audience in the joke it thinks it's telling.

Anderson has a singular vision, and when he remembers to include his audience in the strange stories he's telling, they are extraordinary works of art ("The Royal Tenenbaums," "The Grand Budapest Hotel"). When he wanders too far off into his own visions, the audience is left sitting staring at the screen thinking "WTF?"