So I haven’t actually seen many Wes Anderson movies. I saw Rushmore way back when, which I remember liking; and then rather later (but still like ten-plus years ago) I saw The Royal Tenenbaums, which I liked a great deal. So I’ve always had in the back of my head that I should watch more of his movies. But if they’re mostly like Asteroid City, then maybe I actually shouldn’t.

So we start off here in a framing conceit, that we’re watching an old-school black-and-white TV show that’s telling the fictional backstage story of a fictional theatrical troupe putting on a performance of the fictional play “Asteroid City.” And so the movie proper is that play (although it’s not play-like at all, and is in bright Instagram-filter color), periodically interrupted by the framing TV show.

This structure seems almost designed to make you feel removed from what’s happening in the movie. In this it’s aided by the acting, which is just incredibly cold and mannered and distant. There are all kinds of things happening about which people should be feeling things, but they essentially just don’t — and on the rare occasions they do, they don’t so much express them as tell you about them in cold, neutral narration.

And so look, normally if someone says that a movie is cold and cerebral, hyper-formalist and gorgeously shot, I would say that it’s right up my alley. But for whatever reason, all the layers of distance here served to keep me from really caring at all about this one. The story within the play has a lot of elements that should be fascinating, there are character interactions that should be interesting, the interplay between the layers of the story is complex and echoes themes across them. But I just don’t care.

What I’m unsure about is whether this is a general Wes Anderson thing, and Royal Tenenbaums would hit differently if I rewatched it; whether it’s something specific to this movie, and my opinion of other Wes Anderson movies would be different; or if it maybe was just something in my mood tonight, and if I were to rewatch it some other day, I might like it better.

But whatever it is, all I can really say here is that while I recognize this is a quality movie and has a lot of admirable qualities, at the end of the day it didn’t connect with me.