By this time, you’re either a diehard Wes Anderson fan or most definitely not. So presumably that’ll decide whether you see his new film Asteroid City. He’s become so extremely Wes Andersonian over the years that people who merely liked his early films like Rushmore (1998) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) have fallen away gasping for relief, unable to handle the increasing airlessness of his authorship.

Asteroid City, ironically, is about the vastness of space and the grand mysteries of life and death, involving the attendees at an astronomy convention in a tiny American desert town that becomes the site of an actual alien landing. But Anderson’s way of handling such expansive topics is to make everything tight and contrived and stage-bound. It’s possible that he’s trying to convey the limitations of human experience, and the way we tend to live stuck within stiff, diorama-like architectural arrangements and confining social conventions and stodgy habits of mind, no matter what extraordinary things happen to us.

But I don’t think so. Lately especially, Anderson movies — no matter what the premises or plot developments — always use complex frame stories and theatrical settings. It just seems to be because he likes the effect.