Tema: Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

Ves tú, esto si. Ciscate en ella al máximo si eso es lo que te nace pero argumentando lo mejor que puedas o sepas.

Spoiler:

It would have been silly to expect this to work on a conventional storytelling level. There's no world where that would have happened, and even though it ended up being worse on that level than we could have imagined this was always meant to be a bold and surreal phantasmagoria, a poetic nightmare of an empire in free fall, a groundbreaking and innovative application of a blockbuster budget. That was the promise of this thing, you know? An interesting mess that holds a dark mirror to our diseased world and shakes up the industry a bit in the process. I would have been thrilled with that, warts and all.

But Christ in heaven. I can not express strongly enough how thoroughly and profoundly Coppola failed. I don't even know where to start.

As an experimental film it's laughable. Everything is so surface level and obvious. It demands nothing of you. When an image even APPROACHES being interesting he cuts to a character just stating the concept in words as if you're too dumb to understand. A giant CGI Lady Justice looking weary and dropping her scales is too subtle, I guess, without someone looking to the camera and saying "injustice is everywhere". A cool Georges Melies shot of a robed hand pulling the moon into a cloud, better cut to the mayor and his wife waxing poetic about the weird moon dream he just had. "A man of the future... consumed by his past." You don't say! At every moment you can see the wheels turning in his head: you know what he's going for, the EXACT thought process. There's no mystery, no surprise, no nuance, he even underlines all his influences and allusions in the most blatant way possible. It's the most undergrad shit I've seen in a cineplex in years.


As a philosophical piece it's embarrassing. Immensely heavy-handed. There's absolutely zero subtext, everything is just spoken directly without any sense of grace or subtlety or finesse or anything. The parallel between the fall of Rome and contemporary America isn't even that original in the first place but Coppola runs it into the ground, getting more eye-rolling with every iteration that comes up. And dude, I'd die happy never seeing another one of these pretentious Ayn Rand "visionary genius misunderstood by the philistines" things ever again, especially with the obvious analogue to Coppola himself. The master is back to show us all how it's done, huh? Give me a fucking break.

As worldbuilding (I don't love that word but the poster uses it so I'll play along) it's completely unconvincing. Sometimes it's the Hunger Games, all garish and colourful, and then other times they just obviously went outside on some NYC street and shot as-is with no dressing or anything. The sets and costumes don't "pop" the way you'd want in something like this. Mobs on the street will hold up absurdly on-the-nose signs ("Make New Rome Great Again!"), newspapers will have absurdly on-the-nose headlines ("Murder Case Reminiscent of Hitchcock Thriller"). Verisimilitude is often undercut for the sake of tepid old man humour, like a vapid celebrity news show called, I shit you not, "The Dingbat News". It's all too silly and childish to be believable but it's also too similar to our world to have a fantastical or escapist quality to it? It's an awkward middle ground.


As a sumptous visual feast it's a bust. It often (usually?) looks shockingly cheap and shoddy. Arbitrary framing, garish lighting, static and dull compositions. There ARE some good moments, to be as fair to this thing as possible, but even those are undercut by unnecessary narration or a shitty musical sting or a jarring transition or something. And besides, it's incredibly plot heavy! Even if it WAS better looking you don't really get the chance to just let go and bask in what's on screen. There's always some ponderous narration or goofy set piece or verbose dialogue to take you out of it.


As an ensemble piece it's a low point for practically everyone. Plaza escapes unscathed (don't you just love her?) and LaBeouf goes as gonzo as is appropriate, but I honestly can't bring myself to praise anyone else. Maybe this is impossible material that you can't realistically elevate but there's a dreary dullness to most of the performances that I struggle with. Emmanuel has no charisma or presence whatsoever. Esposito makes no impression. Fishburne just kind of stands around when he's not reciting quotes from ancient Rome. Voight and Hoffman are sad to watch (won't someone please stick them on a bus to Florida?). And Adam Driver, my GOD man. Lighten up a bit!!! He has the hardest job here, obviously, but there's a miserable self-seriousness that pours out of him when he does this kind of "auteur vessel" thing. There is not a second of screen time where he comes across as anything other than completely ridiculous, some lumbering fool taking himself so seriously for a project that thinks reciting the "To Be Or Not To Be" speech from Hamlet is high art. Community college theatre program shit. Embarrassing.

I won't even bother with the storytelling or plot, other than A) reiterating that it's too convoluted and involved for the film to work on the experimental/stylish level that it so desperately wants and B) it has some of the most horrendous dialogue I've ever heard in a major motion picture.

Jesus. What a debacle. If someone else had made this it'd be Jupiter Ascending or Southland Tales, basically, some weird campy flop. But with the context of this legendary artist, the man who made Apocalypse Now and The Godfather, cashing in all his chips on a passion project decades in the making, right at the end of his career, at a crisis point in history where he felt this story HAD to be told? For THIS load of turgid self-important slop to take up so much oxygen in the film world for years? To have the nerve to insist on himself as the avant-garde maverick of his generation and then have Jon Voight pretend a tiny bow-and-arrow is his boner, shoot Shia LaBeouf in the ass and then cut to Adam Driver giving a humanity-uniting speech about man, time, and consciousness?

I didn't have my knives out for this project, believe me. I wanted to love the chutzpah of this, I wanted a weird arthouse blockbuster, I wanted the unfortunate rollout to be redeemed by a vital work of art. I wanted to defend this.

But here I am, perfectly comfortable saying that Megalopolis is one of the worst films I've seen in my entire life.