Megalopolis Review

Spoilers ofc

The critics — those bastards — they hated Apocalypse Now, they hated the Godfather and now they hate Megalopolis. Wow, what a load of losers, can’t they see the vision, the scale, the meaning?

Alas, they have a point on this one.

The problem at the core of Megalopolis is that it’s trying to say something, but that something is supremely uninteresting. It’s not exactly the height of originality to compare America with Rome, and the conflict between utopianism and pragmatism isn’t exactly novel, but it would have been possible to make a good film about these things. Instead, Adam Driver has magic plastic that can bring him back from the dead and replace all known forms of transport with airport travellators — but magic — which are in some way better than cars and trains and the like (even though they are very slow). The result is that we see very little of the actual conflict inherent in building utopia. Yes, when he blows up peoples’ houses they get pretty annoyed, and when the project drags on they protest against him and rally around the populist younger Crassus, but there isn’t really a constituency that doesn’t want to live in the pod or stand for four hours on the travellator to go to the shop because these things are self-evidently better than the bread and circuses regime that already exists.

Removing the magic plastic (what’s it called? Megalon or something) and making our buddy Mr Catiline a straightforward utopian city planner who wants everyone to live in one big tower block and share kitchens, or live within 15 minutes walk of their jobs and shops and the like or maybe they all live underground or above ground but with no windows or lots of windows or maybe we ban clothes or everyone lives in their cars or there are no cars or what if everything was like a drive in theatre, what if we all had just one big toothbrush that we all shared? Anyway, if Cesar was operating in the real world rather than building things out of magic there would be much more of an opportunity for some real conflict externally and internally, Cesar could get hubristic as the project drags on, vested interests could oppose his schemes (there could be a ten minute long scene where various pensioners complain about Megalopolis’s effect on the view) etc etc.

Why doesn’t this happen? Why the magic plastic? I think it comes down to the fact that Francis Ford Coppola has solved society so there really isn’t much room for ambiguity. FFC seems to have a basically hippie view of things in accordance with John Lennon’s Imagine, Live Aid and some very deep and profound images your younger brother shared on Facebook 10 years ago. At points this is basically explicit, like near the end when a sort of oath appears hewn into rock and children’s voices swear to uphold education and being nice to each other and not caring about money too much. Adam Driver at one point literally, an this is not a joke, says that quote about “buying things you don’t need with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t like.” This must be a joke on some level, but it reflects FFC’s views I think. Unfortunately, the brutal world of Roman politics and corrupt 70s New York political machines is not a very good backdrop for this message. Perhaps it’s possible to create a film that has this hopeful message overcoming the odds of the dark Romano-Knickerbroker society but Megalopolis is not that film and would have been better off going with the flow of its setting and creating a more down to earth film without magic plastic.