“Spielberg Syndrome” is a term of my own coining. It refers to when a movie director who also writes their own scripts falls so in love with their own creations that they don’t bring in another set of eyes, another opinion, to help them craft the best movie they can. They ignore the advice from so many excellent writers to “kill your darlings” (because the things that are “darling” to a writer often get in the way of the actual story), and they don’t hire someone who can help them do this.

I called this issue after Spielberg after I started noticing just how often and how long he likes to keep the camera on the faces of adorable children in his films, wresting every last drop of emotion he can out of them. “Hook” is particularly notable for this. George Lucas is another example of the syndrome. As long as he had Lawrence Kasdan on board to help him write or direct, things were okay, but he decided he could go it alone for the Star Wars prequels. I counted how many scenes in one of the prequels (can’t remember which one) started with a different spaceship taking off or landing. Seventeen. That’s a lot of screen time for things that don’t really matter to the story. But spaceships are Lucas’s darlings.

Peter Jackson developed Spielberg Syndrome during his run as writer/director of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies. Jackson got his start doing horror movies and in each successive movie, he had to ramp up the horror far beyond what Tolkien gave us. Wild wolves became oversized hyena-like creatures, orcs got bigger and grosser in each film, and the green, flesh-rotted Dead in “Return of the King” bear no resemblance to the noble shades of warriors that Tolkien describes. The run times for each film also got longer and longer as Jackson deviated from the original story more and more, giving us lots of new characters who all seemed to need to have an “arc” of their own that took time away from the main plot.

I can’t watch Quentin Tarantino films at all. His “darlings” are sadistic people.

Sadly, “Asteroid City” shows signs that Wes Anderson has also succumbed to this disease. While there are still those moments that only Wes Anderson can give us–the Plot B of the alien is a delight–he has packed the movie with far too many of his favorite actors, and instead of letting most of them have a small cameo, he tries to give each one a story. The result is just clutter. It’s not just that he’s trying to work on three levels at once (the film starts out as 1. a documentary about 2. the writing and casting of a play and morphs into 3. a live-action film of the play); he’s trying to do too much on each level. We don’t need June & Montana & the singing cowboys & the schoolkids in the live-action film; we don’t need Willem Defoe & his acting class (and his very weird shoes) helping to workshop the play in the documentary; we don’t need a scene where the actors talk about scenes they were in or were almost in together that got cut; we don’t need to know who played the Alien. Anderson needed someone to tell him “you have to kill this bit.” Without that help, the actual story that Anderson is trying to tell gets so buried by other business that we nod when one of the actors says, at the end, “I still don’t understand what it’s about.”