★
Megalopolis: the greatest movie-watching experience I’ve ever had for such a terrible trainwreck of a film. I don’t know what the fuck I just watched, but my god did I ever feel connected to the rest of my audience as we all suffered and laughed through it together.
Megalopolis is a mess brimming with ambition but utterly devoid of direction and cohesion. It isn’t just agonizing, it is an excruciating test of patience. At best, it’s mind-numbing, at worst, a total trainwreck I painfully endured. It’s an embarrassingly pretentious film that thinks it’s a masterpiece when in all reality it’s an over-indulgent, incoherent, cringe fest with zero direction – a mess of ideas with no weight.
BUT! It gave me an experience I will never forget. I saw this at an IMAX pre-screening that included the live actor during the movie and a live-streamed pre-screening Q&A with Francis Ford Coppola, Robert DeNiro, and Spike Lee. The Q&A was bonkers and spiraled way out of control right after it began. It was insane to watch unfold in real-time and ended up being a great pre-game for how insane the experience to come was.
And wow was it ever so much fun - laughing along with a full audience of cinephiles at the absurdity of this movie. And before you ask, no this is not a comedy, we were laughing at the movie. And yes, I feel bad, this is the legendary Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project with a heavy artistic, experimental vision to it, but it just was such a hot mess that I couldn’t help it. Luckily, I wasn’t alone. And while the movie was largely a failure, this was the most connected I’ve felt to an audience and film community since seeing Avengers: Endgame for the first time. So while I will probably NEVER see this movie again, I am so thankful to have had the experience I did seeing it.
I genuinely cannot believe this movie is real. Needs to be seen to be believed. I have never seen a movie quite like this before. Better or worse, Coppola made the movie he wanted to make, and it's as strange and bizarre and imaginative and insane as you expect, in every single department. Part of me thinks the movie knows how insane it is, and it just gives zero fucks. But who knows? I just have no clue how to actually write about it. Frankly, I could barely explain the movie to you if I tried.
You can tell Francis Ford Coppola thinks a lot about the Roman Empire because its influence is all over the mega failure that is Megalopolis. Themes of time, history, legacy, civilization, technology, politics, the media, and economics are all touched upon in this golden sun-baked, grandiose, overstuffed, and overwritten piece of filmmaking but with little to zero cohesion between them. While Francis Ford Coppola may have made some of the greatest films of all time in the 70s (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now), Megalopolis is not one of those movies. Every member of this cast feels lost as they deliver some of the funniest line readings you’ll likely hear all year. (I think Aubrey Plaza was the only one who KNEW what kind of movie she was in.) Some will appreciate the scale and ambition of Megalopolis. I would’ve admired it more if any of it worked, but at least I’ll never forget the incoherent, messy, WTF experience of it all. Feel like I just witnessed an important moment in film history.
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