If an alien visits Earth, will your life change? Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City asks this question

A theory posits that when humanity first started living in small groups, they could see campfires at night, lit by other human settlements far away. Then they looked up at the stars and imagined little campfires lit across the sky. But why weren’t they falling? They reasoned that they must be something greater than humans, something divine.

Since the advent of civilisation, humans have been in crisis. We want to know where we came from, what’s the meaning of our existence, and what or who created us. Whether it’s the famous French astrologer Nostradamus trying to predict the future or Einstein finding answers in science, humans don’t like uncertainty. 

In Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, everyone’s in a crisis about their existence. Child prodigies are bored with trying to prove their intelligence, actors don’t understand their characters, and a war photographer justifies his craft.

As one character puts it, “Everything is connected but nothing is working.”

The movie is set in the 1950s in the fictional American town of Asteroid City located in the vast expanse of a desert. The town is famous for two things—testing atom bombs and a crater made by a meteorite thousands of years ago. Nobody lives in the desert town, but it comes alive every year for an astronomical convention.

The desert represents the loneliness in the lives of the characters and also in our lives. “In loneliness, you don’t judge other people,” remarks the narrator, who is the narrator of a documentary set within a play within a movie. 

We all live in one form of crisis or another on most days of our lives. It would be out of place if our lives were uncomplicated. 

“If we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how,” philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said.

This movie throws this ‘why of life’ question into overdrive when a group of people at an astronomy event have a rendezvous with an alien who descends from his spaceship only to pick up a meteorite and pose for a picture.

In the real world, the conversation around alien visits is turning real. Other than the various videos of UFOs doing the rounds on the internet, the United States military recently acknowledged the ‘unidentified aerial phenomenon’ as purported alien crafts with advanced technology, evading jets within the blink of an eye. Some senior officials even admitted that the US may even have the biological remains of these alien pilots.

So, if an alien does come ring our doorbell, what will we do?

There are five types of responses as per the American Psychological Association. 

• Freeze response: You will be paralysed at the sight of the unhuman, maybe even inhuman, alien. 
• Fight response: You are a parent out to protect the kids and will throw at them the first thing that gets into your hands.
• Flight response: You will try to jump off a window, maybe even break a leg.
• Challenge response: You will be super focused and offer them tea and biscuits.
• Tend-and-befriend response: You will be courageous enough to tell them not to destroy Earth and maybe even sign a treaty of peace.

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In Asteroid City, everyone has the first reaction to the visit, since the aliens visited in the middle of an asteroid crater with nowhere else to go. More importantly, the moment serves as an epiphany for some and a crisis for many others. 

One child prodigy, who develops a death ray gun and is known for being a miscreant, is asked what’s the cause of his actions. He answers that if he doesn’t cause mayhem “nobody will notice my existence in the universe.” 

An actress, who pretends to be a victim of abuse even when the character she’s preparing for isn’t, is forced to contend with the reason for her suicide. “What’s the point of committing suicide when there is nothing left to escape!” she says. 

Children grieving their dead mother repose faith in a movie where God is like Schrodinger’s cat—it’s there and not there at the same time.

For some of the characters, faith in God helps them overcome grief and process trauma. For others—especially those with a scientific temper—God is improbable. 

And for those already questioning, the alien visit serves as a death knell to their beliefs as they ponder over the meaning of life. Some are threatened, as the war photographer seemed to be, not liking the way the alien looked at them, as if they were “doomed”.

Wes Anderson doesn’t dive too deep into all these existential questions. He poses them through their characters but doesn’t really explore the subject, perhaps to make the screenplay crisp and funny.

But Asteroid City certainly has a deeper existential crisis than even Barbie, wherein Ken looks at his life without the popular doll. 

“This is our chance to be worthwhile in our lifetimes,” one character puts it, and Wes Anderson has made the movie worth our time.