Wes Anderson goes sci fi in his new film Asteroid City, and we couldn’t be more here for it

The trailer for Wes Anderson’s latest film, Asteroid City, just landed, and it’s all aliens, stargazers and our favourite actors – so, perfect then.

It stars Anderson favourites Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Bryan Cranston and Tony Revolori, and some major stars including Steve Carell, Liev Schreiber, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Margot Robbie.

Then there are some surprises: Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker will apparently have a cameo as a cowboy in the upcoming film.

The plot is as haphazard as ever. A group of students and parents gather in an American desert town in 1955 for a junior stargazing convention when they all celebrate Asteroid Day.

But then there’s a major disruption – and by the looks of the trailer, the world-changing events which rock the convention look likely to be aliens. The parents and kids get cordoned off by the army, and so the fun begins.

Asteroid City is being described as a “poetic meditation on the meaning of life” which makes a lot of sense, given that there’s nothing for the new inhabitants of Asteroid City to do other than hang about and ponder over life.

The story has been written by Anderson alongside Francis Ford Coppola’s son, Roman Coppola, who has been working with Anderson since 2007 when they co-wrote The Darjeeling Limited. The film’s score has been made by Oscar-winning French composer, and longtime Anderson collaborator, Alexandre Desplat.

Asteroid City, which was, perhaps surprisingly, filmed in Spain in 2021, is set to premiere at Cannes in May, before its international release in June.

“When you work for an auteur like that, it is a big trust exercise... it wasn’t easy work,” Cranston said to Collider about making the film. “Working for Wes is not easy. It’s very detailed and very specific, and so you really have to concentrate hard. What offsets that is the congeniality and the togetherness of the experience.”

Anderson’s last project was the 2021 film The French Dispatch, which told the story of what happens to a newspaper in the south of France in the Seventies when its editor suddenly died. Anderson is also currently working on The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, a Netflix adaptation of a collection of short stories written by Roald Dahl.

The Netflix film will star Benedict Cumberbatch, alongside Ben Kingsley, Rupert Friend, Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel and Richard Ayoade, and is set to be released in autumn.

Asteroid City is set to be released on June 23