Megalopolis (2024)

Jan 21

Francis Coppola can even turn disasters into masterpieces.

Presentation:

Masterfully bad, Francis Coppola gives us a last hurrah with his final film, an extremely controversial and questionable movie much like Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. This is not the sci-fi epic it markets itself as; it is very clearly a satire or comedy borrowing cues from The Room. However, unlike Tommy Wiseau’s unintentionally hilarious disaster of a film, this one tries to elevate its terribleness to new heights with over the top transitions and clownish effects. But because Coppola is intentionally trying to be unintentional, the film doesn’t have quite the same messy effect. It has the same type of Family Guy humor except with a shakespearean Roman empire dialogue that also makes it so bad it’s hilarious. Dialogue like, “He bought flowers, but for who??” with fake booing laugh tracks. The visuals are intentionally nauseating, overly warm with clipped highlights and very fake CGI. The image quality has commercial video TV soap drama in presentation with expensive cameras and technique except graded like a 2 dollar ND filter. This is quite fascinating when you learn this 2 hour film had a budget of $120 million and bombed at the box office making a fraction of that. It is quite impressive how much trust the actors and investors placed in Coppola, which was unsurprisingly poorly received, though I believe it should get cult appreciation in a decade. It’s probably meant to be watched in montages or Tik Tok clips. Tonally it is similar to surreal strangeness of David Lynch’s films building upon The Room’s deliberately amateur production and mismatched voice overs. It’s like the director told the actors to perform a comedy like Babylon except it would ultimately be presented and edited as a serious sci-fi epic.

Analysis:

This film is about 2 things. Obviously logic or any standard metric of filmmaking doesn't apply here. It's about the ideas and feeling, demonstrating that feel is all that matters in a story, even surpassing content or plot. It's hard to say what Coppola's main message is because it's deliberately vapid with interwoven serious bits that make it hard to tell his true intent from what is satire. There are three lines of relatively serious dialogue that stand out. "Cesar will destroy the world before he can build a new one." "There are two things that man cannot look at for too long, the sun and your own soul." "The need is to create something that lives on after a City Fair, mayor. Which is why Megalopolis will be built...Don't let the now destroy the forever." The film is about cilivization and creation. You could say these are metaphors for filmmaking, to create new innovative stories rather than familiar standard ones of stable concrete. I think we can all feel that storytelling is getting stale after decades of tried and true formulas. If you understand Coppola's inventiveness throughout his filmmaking career, this interpretation could make a lot of sense. However whether it's this film that makes a compelling argument is pretty unlikely with not the most original vacuous dialogue.

Conclusion:

This film is a disaster. An intentionally wonderful disaster. Coppola is known for being a creative genius and because he has created several of the best movies of all time including Apocalypse Now and The Godfather, there is some benefit of the doubt we can give for this piece of work. He manages to impressively find the exact line where the film isn’t overdoing it. It’s most likely going to be a bad experience for 99% of moviegoers especially if you’re watching it for Coppola’s reputation. But the effect could be positive, like if you had a family dinner with a racist uncle whom might be funny enough to make his presence tolerable, maybe even enjoyable. This film is definitely challenging conventional filmmaking and arguing that you don’t have to tell stories the same way. But this is weird considering it is a bit derivative of what The Room accomplished. Similarly to that film, I didn’t hate this at all actually, I laughed uncontrollably a few times and smiled for a lot of it. It’s long and drones on at times, but that’s the intended effect. It surely must be interpreted that Coppola wants to break the mold for Hollywood storytelling with this puzzling end to his legacy, but I think you will have to have watched a ton of movies in order to appreciate this experimental film. I was pretty open minded watching this so I found it inspiring, daring and somewhat fascinating with Coppola masking his genius under a shroud of stupidity. But will crap wrapped in gold plating sound appealing to you? Truly one of the movies of all time. Marcus Aurelius.

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