Tag: movies

Movies I Have Never Seen #26: Fantastic Four (2015)

What is it? …So, what makes a bad movie? Is it ineptitude, or arrogance, or both? Marvel’s Fantastic Four comics have now been adapted disappointingly into movies four times – a very, very low-budget never-officially-released 1994 Roger Corman schlock-fest, two mildly successful family-friendly 2000s movies by Tim Story, and an outright bomb in the dark, dreary 2015 Josh Trank film. It shouldn’t be this hard to adapt one of the great superhero comics to cinema, but somehow, it keeps missing the mark. 

The Fantastic Four are a family – Reed Richards and his (eventually) wife Sue Storm, fiery Johnny Storm and tragic Ben Grimm, the Thing. They’re adventurers and explorers and Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, John Byrne, Jonathan Hickman, Mark Waid and others have written countless great comics starring them. 

Yet Fantastic Four 2015 is a joyless slog, in love with its own seriousness in a story that should be about wonder and adventure, more Indiana Jones than X-Men. The movie spends far too much of its runtime setting up young genius Reed Richards (an uncertain Miles Teller) and childhood pal Ben Grimm (woefully miscast Jamie Bell) getting involved in a secret cosmic teleportation experiment with scientist Sue Storm (Kate Mara, serious and dull), her daredevil brother Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan, showing little of the charisma he brought to Creed and Black Panther) and Victor Von Doom as a spoiled, egotistical scientist (forgettably generic Toby Kebbell). The experiment changes them all, giving them strange powers in a movie that seems determined to play that as Cronebergian body horror, they end up fighting Victor Von Doom who’s gone evil for… reasons, and then it’s the end.

Like far too many superhero movies it’s all about setting up for imaginary sequels, and Trank plays it all stonefaced straight. Tim Story’s 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four movies were kinda clumsy and cheap, but one thing they got right was the essential light touch a FF story needs, the banter and the camaraderie.  Not a single character in Fantastic Four 2015 is really that likeable.

A fifth Fantastic Four movie, finally meant to be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe proper, is set to arrive in 2025. Will it break the curse?

Why I never saw it. Look, as a wee young boy superhero movies were few and far between, and I gamely saw flops like Howard The Duck and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace in theatres. But in the last 20 years we’ve been deluged with comic content and when a movie bombs as hard as FF15 did, you know, you tend to skip it until you get bored enough one night. Bad movies have their own twisted charm, and I figured it was time to see if this was as bad as everyone said it was. (Should I do Morbius next, or can my heart take it?)

Does it measure up to its rep? An anemic 9% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. A 1.3 star rating out of 5 on Letterboxd. A (rather too generous) 4.3/10 on IMDB. Yep, I’d say it measures up to those. It is indeed as bad as everyone said it was. 

What depresses most about Fantastic Four 2015, besides the utter miscasting of pretty much everybody involved and its relentless dour tone, is how so many wrong choices by Trank show he fails to get what has made the Fantastic Four work for 60 years. The first misstep was relying on the 2000s “reboot” comic Ultimate Fantastic Four as your source material. It’s one of those peak “edgy” decompressed reimagining of beloved characters with then-hip lingo that ages like cheese left out in the sun, and far inferior to the energetic original Lee & Kirby Marvel Comics. 

What makes a bad movie is the sense the filmmakers don’t care about their story or their characters. Trank has the team as brooding teenagers, manipulated by the sinister government and missing the spirit of plucky individualism that drove Lee and Kirby’s original comics. Make Ben Grimm’s mutated Thing, famous for his gritty wit and gruff everyman charm  in the comics, into a sullen government assassin? Also make the Thing disturbingly naked instead of wearing his trademark blue trunks? Check. Have Sue Storm be an adopted orphan from Kosovo for no particular reason? Check! And once again mangle the character of Doctor Doom, one of comics’ most revered villains, turning him into a whiny loser mutated by cosmic energy and quite possibly the most visually ugly interpretation of a comics villain on film outside of Zach Snyder’s Justice League? Double check! (Doom has now fallen short in FOUR movies, which has to be some kind of record in a world where people playing the Joker have won two Oscars.) 

Worth seeing? We live in an age where third-tier comic book characters like Groot, Blue Beetle, She-Hulk and Agatha Harkness are all well-known. Yet, somehow, film still hasn’t quite cracked the secret of how to adapt one of the greatest comics of all time to film. It’s no wonder it took me eight years to get around to this one. By far the worst of four cinematic attempts at the quartet, Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four is exactly as misguided and depressing as the reviews back in 2015 made it sound. If you’re a fan of the comic, like I am, Fantastic Four 2015 feels like an intentional insult. At least we’ll always have the comics, eh? Flame on! 

Detective Kenneth Branagh is here to solve all of life’s mysteries

Every actor has a face that fits certain roles better than others. 

Kenneth Branagh is lots of things – an acclaimed Shakespearean whose film Henry V helped seal my lifelong love for the bard, a director of Marvel movies and action franchises, an Oscar-winning writer, an actor who slots nicely into big-budget productions from Oppenheimer to Harry Potter films to give them a touch of class. 

But my favourite Branagh as an actor (or Sir Kenneth, if you like) is when he’s solving a mystery or two. He’s an actor who feels born to mull over and solve crimes, to be the bloke at the end of the picture who tells the cast of characters who done it and why. 

He’s played two pretty iconic detectives – Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot in three movies, and the late Henning Mankell’s Scandi-noir police investigator Kurt Wallander in a series of excellent English-language TV adaptations. 

Heck, at the very start of his career 30+ years ago a baby-faced Branagh also served up a fine Hitchcockian noir homage with the twisty Dead Again, where he plays a detective who’s not quite what he seems. 

I enjoy watching him in all of them, for even when the material itself is a bit tatty, Branagh remains a cool, elegant centre, whether he’s the magnificently mustached Belgian Poirot or the tense, stressed Swede Wallander. Sir Kenneth excels at showing the mind at work solving whatever cases life throws at him. 

Branagh’s Agatha Christie adaptations of Murder On The Orient Express, Death on the Nile and A Haunting In Venice became a bit of an unlikely low-key franchise the past few years. The star-studded let’s-solve-a-murder thrillers throw back to similar movies of the 1970s. They are more popcorn diversions than timeless classics, really, but I have fun watching every one of them. (Death On The Nile, hampered by very obvious pandemic shooting restrictions and a miscast Gal Gadot proving she really can only play Wonder Woman, is the weakest, while moody quasi-horror movie Haunting In Venice, which quietly slipped into release earlier this year, is quite solid.) Poirot is a classic character that Branagh brings a nice bit of haunted depth to, traumatised by his World War I experiences but animated by a firm sense of justice. 

The Wallander series introduced me to Mankell’s compulsively readable, dour novels, and the Swedish TV productions of them too. Set in an endlessly windswept, grim small-town Sweden, they’re dark but addictive like the best crime fiction. Branagh’s performance as the jittery Wallander, who never quite seems to get enough sleep, always holds my attention as he works his way to a haggard justice for crime’s victims. There’s a mood of exhaustion that hangs over Wallander which could be depressing, but somehow, it works for me, anchored by Branagh. 

However, for a man who’s tackled many British icons from Shakespeare on down, there’s one role I’d still love to see Sir Kenneth step into – give us a Sherlock Holmes, with, say, Alfred Molina as an excellent choice for his Watson. It doesn’t need to be some meta reinvention like Benedict Cumberbatch’s fine series.

Plonk us in Victorian England, give us a mystery or two to solve, and watch Sir Kenneth’s face go to work. As a filmmaking triple-threat, surely Sir Kenneth could write, direct and star in a Sherlock Holmes movie to add to his detective’s kit. 

Life is full of mysteries, after all, and we still need great detectives to solve it. 

Godzilla Minus One: At 70, Godzilla can be whatever he wants to be

There’s been a LOT of Godzilla movies, so how is it that that the 37th chapter in this venerable franchise has ended up one of the best reviewed movies of the year?

It turns out Toho’s new Godzilla Minus One is an astonishingly good movie, let alone a Godzilla movie, the latest in a series of endless reinventions of the king of monsters since his debut in 1954. Set just after World War II, it tackles the weighty subjects of Japan’s post-war trauma and rebuilding and mashes it together with some of the most stunningly visceral kaiju rampages ever filmed. 

It’s the rare Godzilla movie where the human characters are fully realised. It’s the story of a disgraced kamikaze pilot attempting to recover from his war experience, with Godzilla cleverly interlaced as both potent metaphor and big-ass destructive force constantly upending one man’s little life. Godzilla is terrifying in this movie, in a way he’s only occasionally been in the last 70 years. It’s instantly rocketed into my top 3 Godzilla movies of all time.

But it’s also a very serious Godzilla movie – which is totally cool. The thing is, Godzilla has turned out to be very flexible for such a big fellow, so the very same day my son and I were floored by G-1 in the theatre, we also saw the trailer for next year’s American “Monsterverse” instalment Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, which swerves 180 degrees back towards the silly side of Godzilla again. Godzilla and King Kong are set for a good ol’ fashioned monster team-up adventure, and I can’t wait.

Yes, the trailer is kind of wacky, but I loved 2021’s Godzilla Vs Kong for its same combination of bombastic old-school kaiju action with modern special effects, too. Look, any movie with a giant gorilla and reptile having a punching match on the deck of an aircraft carrier can’t be all bad.

That’s what’s great about Godzilla. He can be a horrifying embodiment of nuclear fears as in his very first movie, he can be a quasi-superhero, he can be a big galoot who wrestles other giant critters, he can be a hero or a villain or an implacable alien force of nature. In recent years, the American series of Godzilla films have gone for the popcorn craziness, while the Japanese ones have tried for a little more depth such as 2016’s fascinating Shin Godzilla which was a dense satire of the country’s bureaucracy mixed with a shapeshifting take on the titular creature. 

I watched Godzilla Minus One in the afternoon and then in the evening for a whiplash-inducing change of pace I watched 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars again, which was made to mark the 50th anniversary of the big guy and a temporary “last” movie in a franchise that never truly ends.

It is an insane overstuffed piece of cinema that juggles alien invasions, mutants, martial arts, rap-metal, terrible early 2000s CGI and cameos from pretty much every kaiju from the vintage Showa era on up. It’s like someone decided to mix a 1970s Godzilla movie with a Matrix ripoff and it’s technically sometimes awful but also amazingly entertaining in its go-for-broke fashion. 

Final Wars is in tone and execution about as far away from the layered, emotional Minus One as you can get, but somehow Godzilla works in both of them. That’s the beauty of Godzilla. After 70 years, he’s still got plenty of new tricks up his scaly sleeve.

Keeping It Short Week, Day 7: The impeccable heartbreak of Douglas Sirk

It’s the grand conclusion of Keeping It Short Week, 250 words per post no matter what!

Melodrama is fundamentally uncool. When you think of the word, you think of overwrought tears, exaggerated gesture, implausible goings-on and a story that attempts to throttle your feelings. 

Yet sometimes, we all want to get swept away a bit. Sometimes we just want to feel. And when I crave a bit of melodrama, I’ll skip your soap operas and Jane Austen and go right for the straight stuff – the Sirk. 

Douglas Sirk is here to wring your emotions out like a wet dishcloth. His handful of shimmering colour movies are glittering gems of 1950s restraint, heartbreak and bombast. If you can overlook their more dated aspects, you’ll find some smart, subtle criticisms of privilege, power and wealth that don’t seem all that out of place in 2023. 

Watching gems like All That Heaven Allows or Written On The Wind is like viewing a lush painting coming to life. His frequent star and muse Rock Hudson, a closeted gay man, brings a lot of hefty subtext to his presence in Sirkland. It’s impossible to say how this much colours our impression of him in these movies, but in them he combines the chiseled handsomeness of a Cary Grant with a slightly fragile, insecure veneer. In Sirkland, his characters are all taut with suppressed emotion, and through their fumblings, we learn a little something about our own. 

Oh, and Sirk apparently liked to call his movies “dramas of swollen emotion”, which is way better than melodramas. 

Thanks for reading along this “short” week of posts, I hope we’ve all had life changing lessons as a result. Normal long-winded posting will resume next week!

Keeping It Short Week, Day 5: Creepshow and why short horror still creeps me out

Bwa-ha-ha, it’s still Keeping It Short Week, every post 250 words or less or else:

I took years to actually see horror movie anthology Creepshow when it came out in 1982. I first saw the graphic novel adaptation by the late great Bernie Wrightson in a shop, but as a wee pre-teen I was too scared to buy it, so I’d end up flipping through the pages every time I went to that store, scared stiff. 

Creepshow is a great little mix of gore and cheese, filtered through the sensibility of ‘50s horror comics like EC’s Tales From The Crypt. Throw together a few segments, toss in a cackling host to link them together, and off you go. The beauty of an anthology format is, if you don’t like the current bit, wait a few minutes for the next. 

Horror seems to lend itself to an anthology format more than any genre, really. Much of my favourite horror is short and (not so) sweet – those EC comics, TV series like Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone, Stephen King’s deliciously nasty short stories. 

My favourite Universal Horror movies from the 1930s-1940s rarely hit more than an hour’s length, a lesson to those who think you always need three hours-plus to tell a story. Bride of Frankenstein is a mere 75 minutes long! 

Horror can be longer format, of course, such as many of King’s hefty doorstop books like It. But for me, the best horror hits you hard and quick, leaving you gasping for breath before you even quite clock that it’s over. 

Happy Halloween! 

Keeping It Short Week, Day 3: Why Mystery Science Theater 3000 is still the best comfort food

Hey hey, it’s still Keeping It Short Week, no posts longer than 250 words:

I heard of Mystery Science Theater 3000 long before I saw it, this obscure cable TV show that screened old terrible movies with robots making fun of them. 

I finally saw it in, of all places, a hotel room in Florida. I clearly remember one movie was the Soviet fantasy Jack Frost. It was the damn weirdest, funniest thing I’d ever seen. 

But boy, was it hard to actually watch more. It aired on cable channels I didn’t have money to watch, or weren’t carried locally. I finally found a few VHS tapes, and then DVDs, but even then, they were hard to find or crazy expensive. They were like buried treasure for quip-happy trash film fans. MST3K made me realise just how many awful, hilarious obscure movies there are in the universe. 

It’s all much easier now to watch MTS3K, thanks to the internet. A couple of times a year I get into a real MST3K mood and binge away. For days, I keep imagining myself as Tom Servo or Crow, yelling stupid stuff as life goes by me. Before hateful trolls took over pop culture, MST3K was good-hearted snark. 

I do miss the hunt. Kids today have no idea how hard it once was to find things you’d heard about that sounded cool. I can watch any episode of MST3K I want with a few clicks now, and I love them, but part of me misses the mystery part of that theater. 

Movies I Have Never Seen #25: The Misfits (1961)

Honey, nothing can live unless something dies. – Clark Gable, The Misfits

What is it? The Misfits is a star-packed elegiac meditation on love, loss and the American dream, directed by John Huston and starring Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in their final film. A dusty urbanised western, it follows a young woman visiting Reno to get a quickie divorce (Monroe) and the older cantankerous Nevada cowboy she begins a tentative affair with (Gable). Packed with Hollywood talent, it’s a surprisingly thoughtful, eloquent film wrapped around its May-December romance. 

Yet it’s perhaps remembered most for the melancholy real-life fate of its three stars – Gable, 59, suffered a heart attack and died just 12 days after shooting wrapped. Marilyn, of course, died tragically at just 36 in 1962, and The Misfits was her final screen appearance. Co-star Montgomery Clift, whose life had already been speckled with so much tragedy, died himself suddenly at age 45 in 1966. Barely five years after The Misfits’ release, all of its lead actors were gone. 

Why I never saw it: Can we ever separate a movie entirely from what we know about its stars in real life? You watch The Dark Knight and mourn a bit the loss of Heath Ledger; My Own Private Idaho, we think of River Phoenix and all that might have been. Hell, even Good Morning Vietnam seems a bit sadder now with Robin Williams’ suicide. So it is with The Misfits, where at every turn you are confronted by Marilyn Monroe’s shooting-star beauty and fragility, and wiry Gable at the end of his career, old before his time yet still with a twinkle in his eye. You might write The Misfits off as one of those forgettable endless Hollywood epic dramas of yore, with more scenery than soul to it. But you’d be missing out.  

Does it measure up to its rep? Despite the legendarily chaotic production – with a drunken Huston gambling away in Reno, Monroe suffering several mental and physical health issues – The Misfits is something of a masterpiece. Those grand Nevada deserts shimmer in the black and white cinematography and playwright Arthur Miller’s script, filled with quotable lines, has a barbed, bittersweet wit to it that lifts the film higher. 

I have to admit when I think of Marilyn Monroe it’s of the frothy bubblehead she plays so well in Some Like It Hot or The Seven-Year Itch, a good-hearted soul but without a lot of deep emotional weight. So it’s a revelation to see how good she is here as the traumatised, sensitive Roslyn. You feel her exhaustion as she begins the picture as a new divorcee and the gentle rise in her spirits under the endless Nevada skies as she and Gable’s cowboy cobble together a kind of life out in the desert. Monroe portrays a woman who’s troubled, but hopeful. While she’s still stunningly beautiful and the camera loves her, she seems more human here than ever before, a woman with her own dreams rather than just an object. It makes you sad, to think of what might have been in her future instead. 

As for Gable, he harnesses all of his star power from classics like Gone With The Wind and It Happened One Night into a leathery old cowboy romantic who’s reduced to hunting down stray horses for dog food. With marvellous side characters – Thelma Ritter’s salty older divorcee, Eli Wallach’s prickly mechanic and Clift’s reckless doomed rodeo dude – The Misfits feels like nothing less than an exhausted pit stop on the road away from the American dream. It isn’t a cheerful movie, exactly, but it’s a staggeringly beautiful one, with every one of its hurt characters trying to find their way to a better tomorrow in the empty wasteland of Nevada’s scrub and dirt. 

Worth seeing? Definitely. It feels like a postcard from the final days of Hollywood’s golden age, but also strikingly modern in its mood of ennui and heartbreak. From Miller’s stark screenplay to the very final scene between Gable and Monroe, it’s a world long vanished, but the stars in it still shine with a bright light indeed. God, they were beautiful people, weren’t they? 

If I’m going to be alone, I want to be by myself. – Marilyn Monroe, The Misfits

‘Planet of the Apes’ and learning to love the unhappy ending

*Spoilers* galore for a 50-year-old movie series ahead!

I first stumbled across Planet of the Apes in an after-school TV marathon of the original movies in the early ‘80s sometime. It’s no exaggeration to say they kind of blew my little human mind. And the thing that struck me the most, as I gulped down Planet, Beneath The Planet of the Apes, Escape From The Planet of the Apes and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes in a single week, was that there were no happy endings in this ape-filled apocalypse. 

Everyone knows how Planet ends, with Charlton Heston wailing alone in the sand of a shattered world. Pre-internet, pre-memes, I was just raw enough to be stunned by the gorgeous tableau of a broken Statue of Liberty, and how Heston’s cynical, alpha-male astronaut finally runs up against an obstacle he can’t bully or bluster past. 

Yet it was the impossibly bleak sequel, Beneath The Planet of the Apes, which made me an Apes-man for life. An immensely weird and surreal movie, it introduced peeled-face human mutants, horrifying visions of crucified apes and bleeding statues, and oh yeah – the destruction of planet Earth, blown to bits by a leftover atomic bomb in a struggle between apes and mutants. The final 20 minutes or so of Beneath is as dark as it gets, with Heston (who barely appears in the sequel) shot, mortally wounded and in his final moments, slumping to his death to trigger the apocalypse with what still seems to me like a sigh of relief. The screen fades to black, and we’re told: “In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-sized star. And one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.” And the kicker – this movie was rated G. 

As Beneath faded to black, the first time I watched it as a kid, I was filled with a bone-deep chill of horror that left me feeling very, very small in a vast universe. And the thing is, I liked it. It made the open-ended Empire Strikes Back’s bleak ending, so daring-feeling at the time, seem like a Care Bears cartoon. 

Improbably, they managed to make three more Apes sequels after they blew up the whole world, by throwing in a little time-travel. 1971’s Escape From The Planet Of The Apes lures us in by being the most overtly comic of the series, with charming Cornelius and Zira catapulted back to a groovy ‘70s America, but soon, the darkness inherent in the series seeps back in with an ending that almost tops the nuclear doomsday of the last movie. In its final moments, the two ape refugees and apparently their infant child are shot to death under brilliant sunny California skies, their attempts to escape the end of the world fruitless. There is no way out of doomsday, Escape tells us.

But of course, there would still be another Apes sequel, this time picking up with Cornelius and Zira’s son Caesar – still alive, with another poor little chimp baby shot down in his place! – in what I’ve come to think of as the second best of the series, 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Set in some dystopian fascist 70s-style future where apes have replaced house pets and Caesar rises to lead a revolution, Conquest isn’t subtle in its Nazi imagery and racially charged metaphors, but I forgive it all for the cathartic carnage of its final scenes, where Caesar leads a mob that begins the dark process of overthrowing mankind that ultimately leads it to where it ends up, mute, naked and afraid in the original Planet of the Apes. 

This movie’s ending was deemed so dark that it was edited into something more optimistic for its original release, and Caesar’s final speech ends in a note of possible peace. Forget that and go for the unrated original version seen below, where Caesar’s blood-and-vengeance preaching has the punch it was meant to, and we end for the fourth movie in a row with a dark, dark ending – a city in flames, a brutalised race rising up and the future looking, once more, very, very grim for humanity.

It’s hard to think of a non-horror movie series that ends on such downers for four successive films. (The fifth and by far least of the original series, Battle For The Planet of the Apes, suffered from huge budget cuts and a rather disposable plot set sometime between Conquest and the original on the timeline. It ends without mass bloodshed, but still with a vision of a statue of Caesar weeping, knowing that things will soon get much, much worse.)

Even in more modern Apes movies, you won’t get hug-filled happy endings. Tim Burton’s misbegotten 2001 remake was mostly awful except for the makeup effects, but did end on a darkly dumb note echoing the original movie. The terrific latter-day Apes trilogy all tend to end on less utterly nihilistic points than the original series. Yet each one of them has a more quiet note of rising dread in their climax, a sense that things are only, ever, going to get worse before they ever get better – if they ever do. This Apes fan is pretty excited for next year’s Kingdom Of The Planet of the Apes, the 10th (!) Apes film, but they better not cop out and give us too happy of an ending.

By forcing us again and again to look at the possible end of all things, the Apes movies have had the curious effect of making me look back at the real world with a different eye – appreciating the fragility of it all, the impermanence and the tiny little beautiful moments, whether it’s Cornelius and Zira exchanging a look of love, little Caesar’s love for his adoptive human family in the 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes, or even Charlton Heston and his mute mate Nova, alone on a horse through a blasted landscape, a bleached and battered world that still has a hint of dark beauty amongst all the ruins. 

On all the planets of the apes, there is very little optimism, but yet, we keep coming back, again and again, hoping to find it. I guess that’s what makes us human.

I was into Wes Anderson before Wes Anderson was cool, man

I vividly remember watching Wes Anderson’s first movie Bottle Rocket on a rented videotape (!) sometime around 1997. This quirky heist comedy starred James Caan and a bunch of unknowns (who was this Owen Wilson oddball?) but something about it really grabbed me. Maybe it was the goofy way it subverted expectations, with its cast of dreamy losers and the way it swerved from the story of an inept heist into a weirdly sweet romance as Luke Wilson’s amiable thief fell for a hotel maid. 

Whatever it was, for me, Wes Anderson was on my map. And I’ve been a fan ever since then, from the cult indie days of Rushmore through the big-budget all-star epics of Grand Budapest Hotel and his latest, Asteroid City. Anderson’s offbeat, precise style and humour combined with sadness has always felt tailor-made for my sensibilities. 

Some people really HATE Wes Anderson. I don’t get it, but I can see why – they find him smug or pretentious, overly mannered and obsessed with set design over story. But I don’t agree at all. Wes Anderson makes his own worlds in his films, true, from the elaborate family home of The Royal Tenenbaums to the day-glo Western desert village of Asteroid City.

But what director doesn’t craft their own world, whether it’s Stanley Kubrick or Zach Snyder? At their core these are all still stories about real humans with real feelings, as deliberately told as they may be.

Somewhere in the last few years, though, Wes Anderson went from a film fan’s fetish to a cultural meme, as the internet latched onto his meticulous sense of order and design and “Wes Anderson style” became a thing. The long shots, the staring at the camera close-ups, the yellow serif fonts, the colour coordination and deadpan acting approach launched a thousand viral hot takes and merchandise, from the clever to the obvious and stupid.

Wes Anderson is a style, yeah, but it’s the movies and the marvellous characters like Max Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaum, M. Gustave or Midge Campbell that stick in my mind. The layered design is a setting for the characters, but to me it never overwhelms them. 

Sure, some people don’t like it. The reviews for Asteroid City out there are starkly polarised to a weird degree but it ranks right up there with Oppenheimer as the best movie I’ve seen in cinemas this year, carrying his obsessions with form and function to a stylised peak. 

Asteroid City continues the recent Anderson trend of story deconstruction and pushing design to its frantic limits, where at times it almost seems a live action cartoon. Once again, it’s an all-star cast, and stars like Scarlett Johansson and Tom Hanks mostly slot well within the group of Anderson returning players like Edward Norton and a terrific Jason Schwartzman, leading one of his movies for the first time since The Darjeeling Limited.

The story, like several of his recent works, is layers within layers – it’s a movie of a TV show of a play – and yet, it never quite spins out of control. Anderson has pushed hard at the very idea of straightforward storytelling since the flashback-within-flashback structure of Grand Budapest Hotel, a decision which either heightens the artificiality of stories themselves or adds a layer of chewy meta-context to mull over, depending on how you want to swallow it. Movies are constructs, he seems to be reminding us with a curio like Asteroid City, but that doesn’t mean they can’t mean something. 

I don’t bow down at the altar of everything Anderson creates – The French Dispatch proved a little too cold and stoic for me and the anthology format muddled, and I didn’t think Isle Of Dogs was quite as delightfully screwy as his stop-motion adaptation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox. But even his less heralded films offer me something, like The Darjeeling Limited’s heartfelt take on grief starring fumbling Americans in a chaotic foreign country. 

A lot of critics claim Anderson’s style is too cool and laconic, that the characters never show real emotion. But man, look at scenes like Steve Zissou’s haunting deep-sea encounter with the jaguar shark in The Life Aquatic, the aged bellhop Zero remembering his martyred mentor in Grand Budapest Hotel, Luke Wilson’s suicidal young man in Royal Tenenbaums, the pitch-perfect young love affair of Moonrise Kingdom or Jason Schwartzman’s shattered dad breaking the news of his wife’s death to his children in Asteroid City. Tell me they don’t have heart. Yes, it’s a repressed, wounded heart – Anderson doesn’t tend to do big shouty epiphanies for his characters – but you know, that’s how some folks process things. 

The characters in Anderson’s films are full of submerged trauma, stacked with tales of dead parents, lost children and thwarted dreams, but there’s also always a self-aware wit and dry gallows humour to them. Funny tangled up in sad is my favourite kind of vibe – but it’s not for everyone, I know. 

I get it if you don’t like Wes Anderson, of course. But for me, pretty much every film he carefully crafts and puts out there is a glorious little eccentric gift I enjoy opening again and again. Weird and wonderful, Asteroid City is another gem in a career that’s fussy and mannered … and still, years on from my renting that videotape of Bottle Rocket, it’s a style that feels like it was made just for me.