Ah Wes Anderson. Reliable. Never terribly challenging (well, perhaps some of his earlier works). Increasingly high concept. In fact this may have been one of his more mysterious works. It seems to have borrowed some from the Evangelion franchise. It was a stage play on film. Actually it was a documentary about the staging of a play. Actually it was call for hope. Actually…

At first I was quite annoyed by it. Eventually I chalked up the almost sacrilegious representation of my beloved desert to the intention to portray the story as taking place on a stage, achieving a Looney Tunes visual style, almost like the first Space Jam. It was a wildly hilarious setting. It worked as an effective contrast for highlighting was is probably Anderson’s hallmark, even his strength, which is portraying profoundly broken people and creating the circumstances under which these hurt people can see each others' pain and try to accompany them through it. The concept of the characters as being actors within a play, the theatricality of the theatrics, served to embellish his narrative strengths, bringing a laser like focus to the characters and their simmering sentiments.

The music and sound design were hard to gauge, as I was watching the film on a plane, but I did catch, and adore, the music during the first landing scene.