If a “twee” falls in the woods, would anyone hear it?

“Asteroid City” is the latest from the Tsar of Twee, Wes Anderson. It’s an all-star, pull-out-all-the-stops “comedy” that wrestles existentialism, Group Theatre, “The Twilight Zone,” 1950s paranoia and 1950s sci-fi, Theatre of the Absurd, Scarlett Johansson and uh, “The Big Bang Theory” into one movie.

Love Wes Anderson movies? This is as Wes Anderson as they get. Well, if Wes Anderson was outsourcing his screenwriting, production design and casting to AI.

It is all style over substance, casting over acting, immaculate screen compositions with the odd strained sight gag and the occasional flash of wit over heart.

A newly-widowed photographer (Jason Schwartzman) with the surname of the editing table used back when movies were made on celluloid (Steenbeck) breaks down midway between Arid Plains and Parched Gulch.

It’s 1955, and Asteroid City — pop. 87 — is host to a teen “brainiacs” science honors ceremony. Fittingly enough, the mesas and flatlands there are within sight of the explosions of an atomic bomb testing grounds.

Asteroid City and its science fair is where Augie Steenbeck was taking teen son Woodrow (Jake Ryan), anyway. Maybe Augie will work up the guts to tell Woodrow and his three tiny-terror little sisters, Pandora, Andromeda and Cassiopia, that their mother died...three weeks ago.

He’d better get that out of the way before his pistol-packing father-in-law (Tom Hanks) Cadillacs over to take them to his golf-community-in-the-desert home.

Other parents here for their kids to show off their science wizardry include the glamorous actress with the stage-makeup black eye (Johansson), a no-nonsense, patent-protecting dad (Liev Schreiber) and a supportive mom (Hope Davis) and a similarly supportive dad (Steve Park).

A Christian elementary school teacher (Maya Hawke) will show up with her field-tripping, prayerful brood, who will deliver the picture’s biggest laugh.

A posse of cowboys (including Rupert Friend and Jarvis Cocker) are sidetracked there and act folksy and play a little music.

A general (Jeffrey Wright) and his aide (Tony Revolori) will present the prizes. An astronomer at the local observatory (Tilda Swinton) is also present for Asteroid Day, a celebration of the meteorite that crashed and created the crater there.

The kids will bond over nerdy science and nerdy wordplay, and maybe flirt. The newly-widowed Augie will unemotionally flirt with the actress, who won’t break character to acknowledge the flirtation.

An alien will show up to snatch the town’s coveted asteroid, forcing everybody to stay there under quarantine.

And none of it is real because none of it is meant to be real. The opening scene is a framing device in which a Rod Serlingesque TV show host (Bryan Cranston) introduces us to the artifice, and the artificialist who created it — the playwright (Edward Norton).

A celebrated stage director (Adrien Brody) bucks up the performers.

A famous acting teacher (Willem Dafoe) will instruct the actors who later appear in the (tele) play. Augie and the actor cast to play him deconstruct the character he’s about to play, and makes out with the playwright.

Yes, we have all the characteristics of a Wes Anderson film, and then some — eccentrics played by a Who’s Who of Hollywood, everybody speaking in a staccato deadpan.

“If you wanted to live a quiet, peaceful life, you picked the wrong time to get born.”

Characters like the motel clerk (Steve Carell) and others pointlessly say “I understand,” a lot, another Anderson trope.

But here’s the thing. It’s so airless no oxygen gets in. The laughs are few, and as dry as the fake desert this is meant to be.

Anderson serves up so many stars he barely uses some (Dafoe, Matt Dillon) and ill-uses others. The great character actor Bob Balaban is reduced to a simple silent sight gag. Not a funny one.

Some viewers will get the many cultural references, the Anderson rep company cameos, and maybe grin. Some will enthuse over the rigidly-enforced style, the totality of WesWorld.

Yet there’s no getting around that two tiered canon of Anderson’s filmography. There are films like “The Royal Tennenbaums” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and maybe his breakout cult film, “Rushmore,” that you can watch and revel in over and over, and that list includes his two animated hits “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Isle of Dogs.” And then there’s “Darjeeling Limited, “Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” “Moonrise Kingdom,” maybe “The French Dispatch” and almost certainly “Asteroid City,” movies that don’t beckon one to “enjoy” them again.

“Asteroid City” is like a stop-motion animated Anderson film, in which he uses real actors in stop-motion. How is indulging oneself in that reductive, self-defeating cleverness a good idea?

Whatever the twee-tempted target audience hopes to get out of Anderson’s latest, this Easter-egg-packed still-life doesn’t play.

Rating: PG-13 on appeal for brief graphic nudity, smoking and some suggestive material

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Edward Norton, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Adrien Brody, Matt Dillon, Sophia Lillis, Jake Ryan, Maya Hawke, Grace Edwards, Steve Park, Steve Carell, Willem Dafoe and Bryan Cranston.

Credits: Directed by Wes Anderson, scripted by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola. A Focus Features release.

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