Played by Adam Driver, Cesar Catilina is simply Coppola himself. And the title Megalopolis and "Megalopolis" as a film are supposed to save a world in crisis. In the film, it succeeds, but so what - if the film itself does not succeed at all.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
If Megalopolis itself had not turned out to be such a memically curmudgeonly film, what we would probably remember from it above all is the huge mishap accompanying its promotional campaign. Perhaps it says all that needs to be said about Francis Ford Coppola's most likely last picture.
Recall: in August, the film's distributor, Lionsgate, released a trailer that began with quotes from alleged reviews of past Coppola films, attributed to well-known names of English-language film criticism. The excerpts from the reviews, including The Godfather and The Apocalypse Now - accusing the films of artistic "emptiness" and "complacency" on the part of the director - were meant to illustrate Coppola's avant-gardism, which is elusive to critics locked in the present of their tastes.
"Look, all the most outstanding films critics also did not understand on release!" - in the atmosphere of poor first reviews of Megalopolis that accrued in anticipation of the film's release, this was quite a bravura promotional strategy. The problem is that most of the quotes turned out to be.... completely made up or attributed to the wrong films. A Lionsgate marketing employee turned out to be to blame for this massive mishap, having one of the artificial intelligence chatbots search for negative reviews of Coppola's films. The unruly AI made up and mixed up the quotes.
The notion that in the case of the reception of Megalopolis only time stands on the side of the ridiculed director is perhaps the only possible line of defense for this exceptionally unsuccessful film. In it, Coppola embarked on an experiment to unleash everything unconstrained in his own creative ego. The result is that the director seems to be defending himself against inevitable criticism with the very premise of the story.
It is no coincidence that its main character, half architect, half Marvel superhero, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), in addition to his incredible intellect and erudition, has the power to stop time. Thanks to this, he reaches the apogee of creative powers, which allow him to literally (in fact, this adjective should be redundant in the rest of this review, because in this film everything is literal) create reality at will.
Catilina is, of course, simply Coppola himself. And the title Megalopolis and Megalopolis as a film are supposed to save a world in crisis. The film succeeds, but so what - if the film itself fails to succeed at all.
The Quake as a Key
Power over time is not Catilina's only superpower. He is also the inventor of megalone, a groundbreaking building material with extraordinary technological properties. The world of Megalopolis is a full-scale sci-fi universe, but Coppola is not very interested in introducing the viewer to this world or explaining its many obscure technical aspects. One has to admit that it's a shame - because worldbuilding is, unexpectedly, the strongest point here.
Megalopolis can best be compared to a bad adaptation of a book, which, after seeing the film itself, seems worthwhile to those unfamiliar with the original. The problem is that there is no original here. It's as if Coppola's own ego overshadowed the few sparks of interesting ideas that were somewhere at the beginning of putting the whole project together.
The story is set in New Rome, which is a U.S. city, but really a declining Roman Republic after a retrofuturistic rebranding. Like any modern, conservative alpha male, Coppola thinks about ancient Rome all the time, and at no step does he deprive us of the dubious erudite pleasure of reading direct references to past events.
The very starting point of the story is a kind of adaptation of the events of 63 BC, namely the plot of Lucius Catilina, a sidelined Roman politician who challenged one of the consuls of the Roman Republic, Cicero. In Coppola's film, the role is played by Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), first the district attorney and then the mayor of New Rome. It's between the idealistic but antisocial, misunderstood Catilina, representing Cicero's failed empire establishment, and the powerful banker Hamilton Crassus (Jon Voight) - as well as his spoiled son, managing as a debonair politician an element of socially unproductive populism (Shia LaBeouf) - that the tiresome plot scramble of Megalopolis takes place.
Quake is the key word - because this is one of the films that, at the level of description, draws in the imagination the horizon of a multi-level Shakespearean political chess game, while in practice it has problems with the basic construction of any rhythm and the introduction of even a minimum of tension. Much of this is due to the reduction of the main conflict to a dispute over a woman - Cicero's daughter Julia, with whom Catilina establishes a relationship against her father's wishes.
Like any sexist grandfather of New Hollywood, Coppola believes that matters of the utmost importance - politics, ethics, ancient Rome - are the discipline of measuring each other's male egos in inches and millions. But he also believes that the greatest trophy of the male ego is winning the war for a woman.
It's the perfect grandfatherly-chauvinist mix, in which only men "exist" (in the subjective sense), and by some miracle it's still possible to be sexist - because it's all played out "over these babes" anyway. What, after all, is a true alpha male without his muse?
In this role Coppola cast the improbably insipid Nathalie Emmanuel, known for her role as Missandei in Game of Thrones. In the HBO series, Emmanuel was a similarly colorless fern to the genocidal conscience that Danerys Targaryan became at the very end. In Megalopolis, her function is basically a plot device to unlock Cesar Catilina's libido - both in the sense of superheroic powers (it's only when the architect meets Cicero's daughter that his blocked ability to stop time returns) and more literally. Julia quickly becomes pregnant with him, and it is for their shared daughter that the crisis of New Rome is finally resolved and a better tomorrow is built.
Contrasting with Julia's character is the supporting antagonist Wow Platinum, played by Hollywood's most prominent millennial post-ironic actress, Aubrey Plaza, best known for her role in the sitcom Parks and Recreation. Plaza is perhaps the best part of Megalopolis, as she is the only one of the cast who seems aware of what a grandfathered circus she is participating in. Speaking with her trademark dispassionate sarcastic manner, issues like "you're damn anal, and I'm damn oral" give her scenes an energy that, despite their visual overload, is terribly lacking.
Visual neuroatypicality from Lucas
And the film is indeed visually overloaded - it's just a pity that on the level of impressions and emotions it doesn't feel that way at all. If around the release of Megalopolis you saw memes on social media comparing the film to, for example, the Star Wars prequels, then you've already read its best possible review. Sometimes it's all too unbelievable how accurately the bizarre aesthetics and tone of Megalopolis can be described by precisely the most neuroatypical space opera in the history of the genre, which was introduced to the world in three acts over 20 years ago by George Lucas (and especially in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith).
The similarities are, of course, at the visual level - at the level of color palette, world design (New Rome really does look like an archaic version of Corsuscant), at the level of the all-too-fetishistically digital image texture, camera work. Visually, there are more associations: contemporary, chaotic Lana Wachowski, cutscenes from first-person perspective adventure games from the 1990s, Zack Snyder with his hyper-comic travesties of myths, or interior design straight out of Trump Tower.
Other similarities to Lucas can be seen in the storytelling layer - like Lucas, Coppola builds quite an interesting world only to tell his story through the exaggerated melodrama of a small group of characters, stuffed into graffiti-like dialogue scenes. In the great epic Megalopolis about the collapse of civilization, for example, we watch a satellite fall on a major metropolis, and we still get the impression that not much is actually happening except talk. Sometimes it's hard to understand how this great mishmash of visual and dramatic attractions - kitschy but interesting from a critical point of view - comes off as tedious and monotonous in motion.
A triumph of ego and an artistic disaster
In an interview promoting the film, Coppola agrees with the interviewing presenter that critics don't understand the film because it is "in a different key" than mainstream cinema. Sticking to a musical metaphor, the problem is different: Megalopolis is played on a few of the same high notes, which without anything in between become impossibly monotonous. Listening to yet another scene in which the characters flip through dense quotes from Marcus Aurelius, rather than intellectual bewilderment, I had doubts that the actors had any idea what they were talking about at all. The momentous sentences about the future of civilization are conveyed in scenes with the plastic clunkiness of Netflix series.
The film is also irritatingly unpolitical. It ends with a tawdry happy ending that doesn't really have a point - except that it's shouted out in Catilina's pathetic speech, straight out of Hollywood's most conventional drama playbook. In fact, the whole architectural-fantastic intellectual foundation of the story, suggesting some structural, abstract depth of the policy crisis that Catilina's genius-savior has access to, turns out to be completely unnecessary. A utopian Megalopolis ensues, as elites resolve old disputes among themselves and settle grudges. Hardly an inspiring vision for repairing the world.
However, perhaps the greatest failure of Megalopolis is the conclusion that the absolute triumph of Coppola's ego, who created the film against all material constraints (and spent $100 million of his own money on its production), is responsible for the film's artistic disaster. Cinema is, from the point of view of the ego of the filmmaker, the most difficult of the arts, because due to the cost of production and the collaborative nature of filmmaking, it is most difficult to create something that corresponds to the singular vision of a single author.
The story of Megalopolis itself, on the other hand, is about the fact that if you succeed, you have a masterpiece, the completion of a genius. But the result shows rather the opposite. Spending a massive fortune to make a film that watches well only in the mind of the filmmaker may not be the worst way to squander one's fortune in modern times - but given the film's artistic merits, the disinheritance of children will probably remain Coppola's only achievement in the final stage of his career. Always something, but the director of Time of the Apocalypse deserved a better finish nonetheless.
.
