Megalopolis

So bad it’s not bad enough to be camp

Francis Ford Coppola will forever be inscribed in the pantheon of great film directors for The Godfather 1 and 2, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and several perfectly good films, like Peggy Sue Got Married and Rumble Fish. He has had some misfires but no one doubts his enormous contribution to world cinema. This is why it is particularly painful to watch this epic disaster of a movie. Megalopolis will not detract from Coppola’s achievements, but it’s a sad, unnecessary coda to a storied career.

That the trailer for this movie is terrible should be considered fair warning. Megalopolis is awful: boring, cheesy, pompous, disjointed, simplistic, vulgar, and, above all, ZERO fun. It’s so self-important and bombastic you can’t even have fun making fun of it; doesn’t even cut it as a campy cult classic. It’s a clunker.

The subtitle of the movie is “A Fable”, and this is the first hint at why it is so dreadful. Fables are succinct moral tales; they don’t necessarily make for compelling dramatic storytelling. In fables, characters function as symbols, as broad stand-ins for ideas, which when translated into a story for the screen, tend to result in one-dimensional characters that are not psychologically or emotionally resonant. Concepts like “Creativity”, “Greed”, “Purity” do not interesting characters make. Hence, it’s hard to care about…