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Megalopolis

I’m no scholar of the works of Francis Ford Coppola. I agree THE GODFATHER I and II and APOCALYPSE NOW are amazing, and I’ve recently grown into a BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA zealot. I enjoyed THE CONVERSATION and THE OUTSIDERS and RUMBLEFISH and THE COTTON CLUB and DEMENTIA 13 and obviously CAPTAIN EO. I’ve had some of his wine, too – we get those little cans of Sofia for Oscar parties. But like most people I’m not really up on the experimental shit he’s been up to b’twixt the 21st century. In fact the last time I saw a new FCC joint was JACK in 1996.

But hell, I wasn’t gonna miss MEGALOPOLIS! You know the legend. He conceived it in the ‘70s, he’s tried to get it off the ground many times across the decades, now he finally did it with his own $120 million. Amazing. Whatever it is, you gotta respect what he did. Become a rich guy just to make a true indie on the largest possible scale. Pretty much all rich guys waste their money in far stupider ways.

When I first heard the title I certainly didn’t picture something like this. I imagined something closer to a straight forward sci-fi movie, even if it was a weird, arty one. But hell, you can get a studio to fund a BLADE RUNNER or a THE FIFTH ELEMENT. If you’re gonna use your own millions you better make god damn sure it’s a movie that even after it’s completely paid for and done the distributors turn the lights off and pretend not to be home. And to be clear that’s not due to any kind of controversial or provocative content in MEGALOPOLIS. It’s just that it’s made by a filmmaker with no reason to give a shit what any human being from an executive down to a ticket buyer thinks or says about his movie. A director who is truly free.

In a certain way my feelings about MEGALOPOLIS are the same ones I had about Jean-Luc Godard’s GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D in 2014: I’m just glad he gets to fuck around and call it a movie. He’s earned it. But I definitely enjoyed this one way more than the Godard movie, and not only because it wasn’t shot in purposely incorrect 3D to hurt your eyes as a prank or powerful statement or whatever that was. It also has the benefit of characters, performances, jokes, etc.

I do think there’s been some exaggeration about just how bizarre the movie is. It’s not some unprecedented thing you’ve never seen, it’s just unusually defiant in its use of unfashionable conventions, tones and styles, especially for a big budget movie by a great director. It explicitly labels itself “a fable,” it’s very up front about being based on the fall of Rome but in a near future. So it takes place in a city called New Rome, there are bacchanals and a chariot race, the main character is a genius architect named Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver, THE DEAD DON’T DIE), his rival is Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito, HARLEY DAVIDSON AND THE MARLBORO MAN), and he’s in love with the mayor’s party girl daughter Julia (THE KILLER 2024 herself Nathalie Emmanuel) so there’s a whole Shakespeare forbidden love thing going on. You know, there’s that cliche lately about how much men think about the Roman Empire, and this movie made me realize that’s because of generations before mine really learned that stuff in school, and didn’t have Star Wars or The Simpsons to compare everything to, so that was their frame of reference. It’s kind of like when I watched WYATT EARP and realized how much that generation prides itself on knowing every detail of the sheriff who shot the guy at the thing and treating it as the most important shit ever. Same here – you know these characters are supposed to be deep because they’re talking about Roman Empire shit.

(Kinda funny that one of the other big stereotypes about men is that we’re obsessed with THE GODFATHER. See: BARBIE, CITY SLICKERS II: THE LEGEND OF CURLY’S GOLD.)

If you, like me, have great respect for Godzilla’s rival Megalon, you will enjoy how often they name drop him in this movie. Cesar recently won the Nobel Prize for the invention of a material called Megalon, and “Sex, drugs and Megalon!” is an actual line in the movie that could make a pretty good tattoo. He wants to use Megalon to turn New Rome into a utopia, while the mayor proposes building a casino.

Cesar also has the ability to stop time with his mind as part of his artistic process, and discovers that Julia’s the only person who can walk around with him while everyone else is frozen. Romantic artist shit. I wonder if Professor X ever found a lady that way? Mayor Cicero doesn’t want his daughter to have anything to do with Cesar, who he unsuccessfully prosecuted for the alleged murder of his wife. (For which Cesar also blames himself, but it was suicide.)

I think most of us will agree that the best character is Wow Platinum, played by Aubrey Plaza in way more of an OPERATION FORTUNE mode than an EMILY THE CRIMINAL one. She’s a TV financial reporter and Cesar’s secret mistress until he starts seeing Julia, so she decides to marry the world’s richest man, Cesar’s uncle Hamilton Crassus III (John Voight, ANACONDA). She’s trying to get his money, as is his son/Cesar’s cousin Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf, CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE), and she knows how to take advantage of Clodio. (She’s hot and he’s an idiot.)

Coppola uses that convention where there’s a seemingly omniscient narrator who turns out to be a character in the story. It’s Laurence Fishburne (BOBBY Z), obviously a good voice, and a guy whose first film was APOCALYPSE NOW. But it’s kind of funny that this wise narrator turns out to just be Cesar’s driver. And also that he turns out to be ordained (he performs a wedding).

There are chapter titles, shown carved into stone, and therefore looking like the BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA poster. A funny storytelling choice is when we need to know that the angry people of the city can’t decide whether to blame Cicero or Catalina for what they’re angry about, so there’s graffiti that straight up says “Who’s to blame, Cicero or Catalina?” This may be an exaggeration, but it feels like about 20% of the dialogue is comically on the nose while 40% sounds like it must be very smart but I honestly I have no clue what they’re on about.

Like a more normal futuristic city movie, there are pieces of world building throughout, and when I noticed a billboard advertising a pop album about chastity I thought it was just a little detail for color. But later the singer, Vesta Sweetwater (Grace VanderWaal) is a major character, in a whole subplot about how she’s famous for being a virgin but then there’s a leak of a sex tape of her and Cesar and he’s gonna be busted for having sex with a minor but it turns out she’s an adult. I don’t know what that’s all about but, no joke, I think it has something to do with the Roman Empire?

Unfortunately Coppola doesn’t crank it up to full BRAM-STOKER’S-DRACULA-eyes-in-the-sky visual extravagance until he starts building the titleistical megalopolis, and it takes a while to get there. Even when he does, the clean digital look simply can’t compete with his old shit. But it has its moments. The deeper we get into the movie the more enthusiastic he gets about layering images like a Sam Raimi montage. And it does start to get pretty strange, even if the futuristic technology ideas are stuff like “what if there was a moving sidewalk, but it lights up?” or “what if there was a wavy gold thing to stand on?”

At the movie’s most entertainingly feverish, Cesar has a glittering Megalon-infused exposed skull, and Wow does shadow puppetry with scissors while sexually manipulating Clodio into a game of corporate chicken with his father.

Driver is game as always and there’s definitely some overlap between this role and what he did in Michael Mann’s FERRARI. The actors must’ve felt pretty free in their own way, being able to trust the documented cinema great telling them yes, I want you to go off script and mega. In this scene, you emotionally yell, “Creation! Destruction!”

But it’s also gotta feel a little silly playing a character whose entire deal is that he’s a Very Important Man. It’s rare that he talks about something besides The Future. When Julia tries to make peace between her dad and her husband and convinces Cicero to come have dinner with them it turns into an argument about the definition of utopia. Personally I would not want to talk to either of these guys about anything ever, under any circumstances.

Coppola seems to have intentionally cast a mix of A-listers, promising up-and-comers, and a few talented people who are now out of favor due to terrible personal lives or politics. I’m unclear whether he was genuinely trying to make a point with that, but if so it only sparked minor passing social media outrage. I never saw a discussion about whether rehabilitation/redemption is possible for a domestic abuser, or whether an old man who was in MIDNIGHT COWBOY should only be allowed to do Kevin Sorbo movies now because of his jerkwad politics. I don’t think anybody has the energy for those conversations, and I include myself in that. But for whatever it’s worth, the two most Problematic individuals in the cast (as far as I know) have the two (intentionally) funniest parts in the movie. I won’t give them away but one involves a hat and the other a bow and arrow.

Oh, also James Remar is in it. And D.B. Sweeney. And Balthazar Getty.

Coppola has cited METROPOLIS as an inspiration, and also I believe THE FOUNTAINHEAD, though he clearly doesn’t share that story’s politics, because his architect character wants to, like, help people. I thought of two other movies this vaguely reminds me of. The first is Andrei Konchalovsky’s NUTCRACKER: THE UNTOLD STORY, in the sense that it’s an ambitiously uncool epic in a fantasy world with historical allusions and is kind of fun for how crazy it is but also kind of unappealing in how little anything connects. MEGALOPOLIS is way better but NUTCRACKER is maybe the more likely one to show your friends and say “You have to see this.”

A less insulting comparison I can make is Spike Lee’s CHI-RAQ, in the sense that it’s a stylized mash-up of a modern world and ancient tale, that’s kind of cool but clearly is trying to say big things that are very corny and kind of hard to parse. I feel like I enjoyed CHI-RAQ more, but then again about all I remember is the general vibe and Wesley Snipes wearing a sequined eye patch. I bet I’ll remember Wow Platinum longer.

There’s a big list of filmmakers thanked on the end credits, not just Coppola’s old buddies but also younger directors. I’m assuming he must’ve shown the movie to them and asked for feedback, and I can’t help but laugh imagining Ryan Coogler watching that and telling the Maestro what he thinks about it. This also reminded me of how George Lucas said after he retired he would keep making movies, but they would be uncommercial art movies he’d never release, just show to his friends. So I wonder

1) has he ever really done that

2) are they anything at all like this

3) if so does he look down his nose at Coppola for releasing his instead of just showing it to his friends

4) wouldn’t it be funny if MEGALOPOLIS was a total ripoff of one of George’s unreleased movies

I’m not sure if I’d even say I liked MEGALOPOLIS. I guess I did. But it’s kind of beside the point. I’m glad Coppola was able to build his city of Megalon, and I’m glad I was able to visit it before Godzilla knocks it over. I honestly don’t really understand Coppola’s plea for the future with full clarity, but I think he sets a good example for a way forward for artists who have some sort of success. Fuck commercialism, get out the freak flag, pour your money on the floor and your heart on the screen. Sex, drugs and Megalon forever.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 5th, 2024 at 7:19 am and is filed under Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

19 Responses to “Megalopolis”

  1. I’m gonna check it out as soon as its available for me. People did a REALLY bad job of talking me out of it. Every time someone tried to explain what an awful movie that supposedly is, they made it sound like one of those post-MATRIX Wachowski joints, which are all pretty brillant in their own ways to varying degrees.

  2. Good for Coppola, but I just can’t. Every single thing about this endeavor is massively unappealing to me. The supposedly eye-popping visuals look like an Audi commercial, the subject matter is some Neil Breen shit, and every line of dialogue I’ve heard makes me want to jab pencils into my ears. I’m willing to accept this as a triumph of artistic expression in a land of corporate homogeny but I’m not willing to throw myself on the grenade and actually watch it. I applaud all of you who do. You’re made of sterner stuff than I am.

  3. I was going to see this anyway, but since Atom decided to give out free tickets, my friends and I made a day of it and caught it in IMAX. I found it confounding for most of the runtime, until I realized he was trying to write a Shakespeare play. That explains some of the structure, character motivations, dick jokes, and dialogue. But with seemingly a happier (?) ending, since it’s speculative fiction about Da Fyooture, and not a historical tragedy. It also definitely feels inspired by The Fountainhead, but I can’t tell if it’s pro- or anti- Rand. Lots of stuff in here about Great Men, America, populism, cancel culture, time, etc. Almost feels like Coppola’s been thinking about making this movie for so long that the finished product makes no sense to anyone but him. A bizarre tour through the brain of an elder stateman of cinema. A Synecdoche, New Rome.

    I didn’t really enjoy it at all (aside from the aforementioned dick joke, and also the hat joke), but I also find its existence fascinating.

    I recently read Coppola plans to make another epic. Does he have any wine money left?

  4. That FFC was able to make this his own way with his own money is where the praise begins and ends. I saw this movie on opening weekend and was never bored by it but what an embarrassing, clunky disaster this is. Incoherent in its ideology, though WAY too tied to a bunch of Ayn Randian bullshit for my tastes. Some of the more gonzo moments are entertaining but I feel like a YiuTube supercut would be more endearing than the finished product. It’s strange that an artist who has won so many awards and made such amazing work can end his career with a film that is just so INEPT but that’s where we are.

  5. I have a personal pet peeve against stories about civilizations and societies that have absolutely ZERO interest in the actual people that live in them, it’s all about the movers and shakers that BUILD society. So boring and fascist. Most superhero movies are like this, too, by the way. Cesar is all about MEGALON IS THE WAY OF THE FUTURE, but he never shows how it actually helps people even though he can STOP TIME with it. The people are either mindless screaming hordes praising Shai LaBeouf’s NaziTrump speeches, or rowdy troublemakers booing Giancarlo Esposito because he’s a bad mayor I guess. You never hear any of them talk about Cesar, or the future, or anything at all, they’re just background players. And what’s Cesar’s big innovation anyway? Looks like it’s those golden walkways that slooooowly take you from one side of the park to the other. SO revolutionary.

    A million points to Aubrey Plaza, that honey-dipped goddess of derision, for rolling her eyes through this whole damn thing while guys like LaBeouf sincerely try to give a real performance. Aubrey, take me with you to the cluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuub.

  6. Does this failed film have, perhaps, a role for Nathan Winters, the boy whose family Coppola stalked and sued, after failing to threaten him (“You’re done, boy, forever”) into staying silent about the six years of rapes perpetrated by Coppola’s buddy Salva?

    Have those abuse video tapes that mysteriously disappeared from Salva’s house shortly before his arrest been found yet?

    Has Coppola ever been… looked at through a lens other than filmic?

  7. The conversation about casting “controversial” actors didn’t seem to catch fire, but I am kind of surprised that Coppola caping for a child molester didn’t get brought up more (other than by the previous commenter). James Gunn got fired when people pulled up old tweets JOKING about pedophilia, but Coppola remained pals with/advocated for/produced the films of convicted pedophile Victor Salva who assaulted the child star of his movie (produced by Coppola) and taped it. That certainly makes the whole “sex tape with a minor (but not really)” subplot even ickier.

  8. Vern, when you said that this vaguely reminded you of a couple other movies, I thought one of those would be SOUTHLAND TALES, which I think I’ve seen other people compare it too.

    As a Gen-X-er, my indie filmmaking heroes have mostly been outsiders who made ultra-low-budget movies outside the system like CLERKS or EL MARIACHI or SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT. I think our grunge generation had more of a punk underdog working-man aesthetic. Even some older directors (Romero, Cassavetes, late-career Orson Welles) had a similar DIY spirit.

    By contrast, the personal-vision filmmakers of Coppola’s generation – the 1970s “New Hollywood” directors – seemed to be much more obsessed with scale and status and prestige and importance, and making movies that are big and/or long (Scorsese’s 3.5-hour KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON seems like an equivalent late-career gesture). “Cinema” to them means a big event that gets other people talking about them and writing about them; ignoring the existence of indie and specialty cinema has been a crucial part of their “there’s nothing but special effects movies anymore” rhetoric of the past half-century.

    It recently occurred to me that most of those 1970s directors started out as apprentices of Roger Corman, a guy known not only for tight budgets and schedules (and brief running times) but for the humility and friendliness he exuded in interviews. I always thought these guys were proud of having cut their teeth under his tutelage and saw him as a mentor and role model. But I’ve started to wonder if maybe it’s the opposite, since of all his A-list disciples Ron Howard is the only one I can think of who didn’t move in the opposite direction of giant budgets and running times, going over schedule, and/or drug use or out-of-control behavior.

    Maybe deep down these guys wanted to be David Lean and/or Elvis, and are secretly ashamed that they ever had to slum it in low-budget cinema. If so that represents a previous generation’s belief that it is shameful to be poor and/or lower-class, hence their fascination with gangsters and empire builders. Boasting that you sold a family winery to make a $100 million epic is a very different origin story for an independent movie than selling your body for medical research to make a $7000 movie, or filming after hours at the convenience store that you’re currently working at to make a $27,000 movie; this alone seems to express a generational difference about what we should be impressed by.

    So I went into MEGALOPOLIS with skepticism towards the assumption that money and scale equal artistic value, and the movie did more to confirm my skepticism than to disprove it. My take on the movie is that it doesn’t really have a story to tell or ideas to express, it just wants to convince you it’s important by name-dropping things that have stature and snob appeal: the Roman Empire, banks, New York City, architecture, dead philosophers, etc. It felt like Coppola was more interested in trying to buy our approval than in making a movie worthy of our approval.

    Glaive, I’m with you on the movie’s classist depiction of “the people” as a mindless angry mob who don’t understand greatness (i.e. cinema). There are some powerful images, and I’m glad I saw it on the big screen. But I’ll be surprised if it gets canonized to the degree that APOCALYPSE NOW, THE GODFATHER and BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA have been.

    I don’t watch a lot of those “pitch meeting” parody videos on YouTube, but the MEGALOPOLIS one is hilarious, especially when they say out loud the thing we’re all thinking about the moving walkways, that they’re a non-futuristic existing thing that we already have in airports.

  9. Coppola since YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH isn’t giving best arguments of him being unrestrained.

    Curt – to be fair Opie also has humility. He’s had his ups and downs, won awards and had hits. I get the impression he has the same complaints as other directors with the industry. But he’s like “but I still get to make movies.” His family is fine; his daughter is trying to be a director herself.

    Reminds me how Soderbergh has had his ins and outs with moviemaking because he would get tired of trying to come up with new fresh framings for say an otherwise routine scene. Interviewer says what about Eastwood? Soderbergh says Clint is more interested in storytelling than framing.

  10. Curt- great comment.

    Majestyk, the execution is also pretty Breenian at points. I’m 95% sure the ‘opulent’ chariot sequence was shot at Medieval Times in New Jersey. During that part and a few others Coppola seems to have stopped just short of beseeching the audience via subtitles to mentally compare the movie to the work of Fellini, but formally and tonally, it feels a lot closer to one of those literary adaptations Hollywood churned out in the 1990s that only fully made sense if you’d read the book (like, I dunno, how about THE RAINMAKER, just to pick an example at random). Lots of “famous actor in minor role I don’t understand the purpose of” and a gradual realization that I’m expected to fill in lots of narrative, and even thematic, gaps.

    And yet, I had a blast watching it! I laughed aloud quite often, which is another way of saying that Coppola quite often miscalculates to a comical degree what the moviegoing public will find impressive, confusing, sexy, funny, charming, relatable, or deep.

  11. Fellow Americans, be safe, y’all. We’re fully on Fury Road now.

  12. Guys…. how do we… how do we go on? What do we do now? How do we live in a world that wants this?

  13. Come on, MEGALOPOLIS didn’t make that much money.

    Oh, you mean…yeah, I guess just like before. Hope for the best, resist when- and whenever you can and expect to duck and cover at any moment.

  14. We know now beyond a shadow of a doubt that all of our systems are completely impotent in the face of corruption and manipulation. We are on our own out here. We must protect ourselves and each other as best we can. They want us burned out and insane, so we mustn’t wallow. It will get worse than we can possibly imagine, so we must do what we can to keep our spirits up and maintain our values in whatever meager way this degraded culture will allow us. We lost this fight but the war continues. So stay healthy out there. We need you.

  15. This place was one of the only places I could turn to in 2016 after seeing my faith in humanity vaporize overnight. Knowing there are intelligent, empathetic people left in the world (and on the internet) was crucially important to me. Today feels like the second shoe to drop in the overall arc of my life, and this site (and all the comments) are equally needed for me.

    Part of me wants to answer Mr S. in a doomer way with a quote from the Last Starfighter- we are caught in the moon’s gravitational pull, what do we do??

    (Alien tech monocle flip) “We die.”

    But I’m not gonna give the bastards the satisfaction.

    From someone with preteen daughters who has lived in a deep red state that makes headlines for forcing literal children to carry their rapist’s baby to term and prosecuting doctors who try to help, I’m reminded of a line I’ve taken to heart for use towards mental survival in this kind of shithead culture for decades, from Mobb Deep by way of Sublime:

    Long as I’m alive I’m gonna live illegal.

    I hope you guys don’t stop striving for Excellence, even if we have to swim against the current. This site and all your comments and thoughts matter more than you know

  16. *sight

    Dammit

  17. These days, for me, it helps to not engage too much in my grand theories of everything or forecasts about the specific trajectory of the future, because the former can be rigid and difficult to sustain and the latter are usually wrong. I am reasonably confident I’m alive, reasonably confident I will someday die, and I have a broad sense of what kind of person I am, who I love, and who I aspire to be. Beyond that, it’s a lot of angst and words and hitting the refesh button (which is no big deal in moderation).

    Hang in there, y’all. I concur with the sentiment that I would prefer for more even-tempered, thoughtful, compassionate people to be in the game (minimally, alive and trying to live out your values), which is the main thing we have some control over and will find ourselves making choices about each day whether we like it or not.

    Peace and love to all.

  18. I wondered whether to post normally earlier, and I went with it, out of a “they can’t extinguish our light” sensibility. But, yeah, I also think that Trump’s victory is extremely horrible. If 2016 ushered in the post-truth era, we’re living in a post-reality one now.

  19. Vern, if you want to see more Coppola batshit uncommercial studio bankrupting art, definitely check out One From the Heart!

    This year’s Reprise Cut is actually much better paced but you can probably still appreciate the audacity.

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