Warning: I try to avoid spoilers in my film reviews as I want my reviews to stand up before and after viewing. In this instance, I wanted to talk about the ending so Spoilers Ahead
Chances are, if you willingly opened a review of Megalopolis, you already know what you’re expecting to hear. You know about the very long and torturous production of this movie. The concerns, the praise, the general “huh?” that rang through the air after the premiere. The internet has not been quiet about its thoughts, as usual, and I have to say, heading into the theatre last week, I was trepidatious. I had done my best to avoid spoilers and was becoming increasingly concerned about the little I had heard, mainly that the film may be trying to do too much and ends up boring the audience.
If there is any way to reasonably describe this film in a sentence, it would not be “boring”. Coherent may be another you would avoid using…
Megalopolis is a beast of a movie. On Letterboxd, I described it as “three movies crammed into one” and that is almost doing it a disservice as well. There are about 50 different movies in here. How many of them are good? Well…
The one that hooked me was the one that kicked off within an early scene. One where Caesar (Adam Driver), storms into a meeting about the future of a demolished block of buildings — a meeting where all participants and scantily clad on-lookers are standing on a rickety catwalk above a model of New Rome. This film is a sci-fi, Shakespearean drama, a lead with an inability to let go of the past as his tragic flaw, corrupts himself and his city. The actors in this film all perform accordingly, with the rhythm of their lines being as important as the tone or the actual words they speak.
Then there are the other ones. The most egregious being a weird, off putting, almost YA novel quality, dystopian story — one attempting to be an analogy for the end of an empire and critical of the United States' direction. In this one the plot and production are incoherent. Characters receive superpowers with no basis on the plot, existing solely for the purpose of the hamfisted metaphor about the decline of the USA. Multiple actors chew the scenery, creating a tone completely baffling at every stage of my desperate attempts to cling to some understanding of Megalopolis.
You may be sitting there asking, “If there’s so much going on in this film, what is it actually trying to say overall?” That for me is also difficult to unravel, as the film’s earnestness about its themes is almost entirely pushed aside by the complexity of the story’s events and the anti-mainstream production design. To me, Megalopolis is about facing the future, one not too dissimilar to our own, where hopeful outcomes are harder and harder to accept as a possibility. So instead, we pause, turn back, and adopt facsimiles of the past to prevent us from dealing with the effort of forging a future. I had been reading Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter that week, a book that deals with similar themes, so I may have taken some of that in with me…
Earnest was a word I kept using to justify what I saw when I came out of that cinema. It kept coming back fully formed without the justification to back it up:
“What did I mean by “it was earnest?”
“Why was this so soothing to me?”
“Why did I enjoy the movie because of this?”
I thought about it a while longer and came to a conclusion that some may consider generous. It is impossible not to see what’s going on here: Megalopolis, for director Francis Ford Coppola, is the culmination of a storied career. Megalopolis is a film that has existed in some form alongside Coppola since the 70’s. Like any creative, he had become hooked on so many of the ideas for his project that he desperately did not want to let go. In his instance, he had nearly 50 years of ideas to try and cut ties with it. With that context and the fact that it’s so clear what he was trying to get at with this film, it becomes oh-so-easy to ignore the quirky (in a bad way) performances, the jittery pacing and the production design that seems to not have a too clear idea of any of the ideas the story is trying to tell.
This even helped me overcome the ending’s many failings. As I look back on it from here, I remember the awkward family-friendly ending where Caesar and his wife Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) stand upon a golden stage with a cheering crowd and they set down their child as a symbol of the future. But I also remember a pretty grisly and well-shot scene where the fascist analogue, Claudio (Shia La Beouf) is strung up, his body shadow-cast against the downtrodden scenery — à la Mussolini. Try and tell me again that Coppola doesn’t have anything to say.
Megalopolis is a film that I am glad exists.. It is a film that I will watch again willfully, and enjoy it for all of its amazing aspects. I will also sit down, watch it, feel utter dread at some of the truly insane choices this film makes, and grow angry at myself for viewing them again. This film is a product of a mind with many ideas, and a refusal to accept that you can’t use all of them. I’m sure most artists would agree that it sounds liberating in spite of the recognisable bloat that drags it down as a film.
Edited by Cormac Nugent
2024
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