To explain Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City,” an ambitious yet mystifyingly dysfunctional meta-movie, in terms of both form and content, it may be helpful to walk a prospective viewer backward, outward from the center of this most puzzling — and, most puzzlingly, ponderous — of puzzle boxes.
Set in 1955, against a robin’s-egg-blue sky that looks like it has been juiced up with an Instagram filter, and featuring the filmmaker’s signature fabulous yet fussy production design, the main action takes place in the titular mid-20th-century Western American town: a desolate desert outpost with not much more than a cluster of motel cabins and an auto body shop, so named because it is the site of an asteroid fall years earlier. The preserved, volleyball-size rock itself is hardly something to instill awe, but it somehow attracts an annual gathering of young space enthusiasts and their families for a few days of science-camp fun.
