Skip to main content

Megalopolis


For obvious reasons I approve of both stories about imaginary cities and old men blowing their savings on self-funded movies, so I felt obliged to go and see Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis despite the decidedly patchy reviews. And much to my surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed it! 

It's a very odd film: a sort of allegorical drama set in 'New Rome', which looks like New York, but where people wear slightly Roman-inflected costumes and have names like Crassus, Cicero and Ce(a)sar. The idea that the United States = Rome is an old one, but I'm not sure it's ever been done quite this literally: there are chariot races in Madison Square Garden.

But the story isn't an updating of any particular episode from Roman history. It's about a genius architect 'Cesar Catilina', played by Adam Driver, whose vision of a utopian new city built from his wonder-material 'Megalon' is frustrated by the cautious mayor, Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). All the characters Represent something: Catilina is art and progress, Cicero is the status quo, and the rabble-rousing Pulcher (Shia LaBoeuf) waves the flag for Trumpist populism. Cicero's daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuele) provides the Love without which Catilina's artistic powers would be useless (the film is dedicated, movingly, to Coppola's late wife Eleanor). Oh, and there's also Jon Voigt as the power of Capital, and Aubrey Plaza as an amoral journalist named Wow Platinum who represents – well, amoral journalism, I suppose. 

You know all those rules of storytelling that screenwriting gurus like to talk about? Megalopolis has thrown them in the bin and written its own rules, and then thrown them in the bin and decided to just wing it. No three-act structure here. No guarantee that the myriad plot-points it introduces will ever pay off. Catilina, in addition to his magical Megalon substance, has the ability to stop time, but these sci-fi elements don't play out in the story as they would in conventional fantasy or sci-fi - they're METAPHORS, you see, and so is almost everything else that happens on screen. At one point, during a visit to the city's seedier side, huge classical statues of truth and justice slump wearily against walls, or collapse in alleyways. 

Subtle it ain't, and it probably sounds unbearably cheesy. But it's all so earnest, and so unpredictable, that it's somehow never less than entertaining. It's strongly dependent on state-of-the-art special effects, but the world they conjure is determinedly artificial-looking, and the dialogue and delivery sound tremendously old-fashioned: close your eyes, and you could be listening to a film from the '50s, or the '30s.

The sincere utopianism is old-fashioned too: Catilina's big appeal to the masses at the end sounds like Chaplin's speech about 'the soul of man flying into the rainbow' at the end of The Great Dictator. Big Ideas are thrown around like confetti, but I'm not sure they're explored in any real depth. Although there are plenty of jokes, it's hard to be sure sometimes if we're laughing with the film or at it. It seems to have bewildered a lot of viewers. But the key thing is, I don't think Megalopolis cares. It has the same weird, earnest energy I find in middle period John Boorman films. It's just going to do its own thing and explore its own brilliant, flakey ideas, and the audience is welcome to come along for the ride, but it absolutely doesn't give a damn whether they think it's cool or not.

Well, I think it's cool. And there was never a moment when I knew what was coming next. How often can you say that about a film?


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thunder City

This September Scholastic will be publishing my new novel set in the world of Mortal Engines . Here’s the cover, created (like all the others in the series) by Ian McQue . The rule I set for myself when I was writing this one was that it shouldn’t feature any of the people or places from previous Mortal Engines books. So  Thunder Cit y takes place just over a century before the original book, when the town-eat-town world of Traction Cities is slightly less ruthless than it will become later, and none of the characters from the original quartet has even been born yet. (I suppose Mr Shrike must be bimbling about somewhere, but he’s still just yer basic implacable killing machine at this point so there’s not much point in paying him a visit). So hopefully this new take will be accessible to people who’ve never read Mortal Engines , and hopefully people who have read it will enjoy an adventure set in the same world. My pen and ink drawing of the Traction City of Thorbury,  after...
10 comments
Read more

Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin...
5 comments
Read more

Merlin (1998)

I remember Merlin being shown on TV as a two-part mini-series over a bank holiday weekend. The version I found on YouTube is a single three hour movie, but I think it might work better in two chunks, as originally broadcast. It still works pretty well, though. Director Steve Barron is completely infatuated with video editing tricks and slightly primitive CGI effects that I’m sure were state-of-the-art when it was made, but he uses them quite inventively, and there are some very enjoyable performances. Since First Knight was such a washout, I guess this is the definitive ‘90s Arthurian film. Like Excalibur , the definitive ‘80s Arthurian film, it tries to tell the entirety of the Arthur story, but since it’s main focus is Merlin it covers a lot more too, and Arthur himself ends up being a bit of a side-character, with the rise and fall of Camelot packed into the second half. At first glance, Merlin seems to be aligning itself with what I’m coming to think of as the Low Arthurian tradi...
Post a Comment
Read more