So I bit the bullet, summoned up my courage ( no Dutch courage was involved, alas ) and saw Megalopolis yesterday afternoon. ( My wife and I were the only patrons in a surprisingly large, otherwise empty theater in the Fort Worth area. ) My first impressions: It’s bad, but in a bonkers, utterly pretentious sort of way, and in that sense, if you’re at all curious, go see it on the big screen– it probably wo n’t be there for much longer. In what could well be his last film, Francis Ford Coppola, 85, boldly goes where Star Trek has gone before, but with$ 120 million more to spend on his cast and visuals than the 1966-era Trek , could afford, envisioning present day America ( specifically New York City in Coppola’s case ) as a 20-minutes into the future version of Imperial Rome.
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It’s even a 21st century reimagining of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, as John Podhoretz notes at the Washington Free Beacon, asking” How is a great designer make anything this bad”?
The engineer from The Fountainhead, around called Cesar Catilina]Adam Driver], is at odds with the governor, Frank Cicero]Giancarlo Esposito]. New Rome is awash in hedonism. Catilina has won the Nobel Prize for his work on the fresh material Megalon, which he created to replace the former city. Cicero does n’t want him to build a new city. Catilina, who has the ability to stop time but does n’t seem to use it very often or for any reason, has a lot of other opinions.
Madison Square Garden hosts a horse competition (kind of because New Rome is New York ). Dustin Hoffman is a gang, and Jon Voight is a businessman, though why they’re in the film is anybody’s think, though they do fit up a little with figures in the Roman crime. With a stone ring, a serpentine alarm named Wow Platinum ( Aubrey Plaza ) tries to hypnotize people. Vesta, a chaste young chanteuse, is seen having intercourse with Catilina, which is obviously inappropriate. In the end, Coppola rewrites the Pledge of Allegiance into a pledge of allegiance, not to the flag but to everyone else, and the new area is built—it looks like the dessert place in Willy Wonka.
As I previously mentioned, the film cost$ 120 million, and I believe Coppola was somehow involved because of how much money was spent and how much it looked to the people who provided the funding. Never to bring up Ayn Rand once, but the video it most resembles is the atrocious three-part type of Atlas Shrugged , released a decade ago. The color scheme is the same, as is the terrible rear-projection job, and the overall cost for those six days was around$ 20 million. Every dollar is n’t on the screen, is what I am saying, and that’s putting it mildly.
Getting Woke, Go…
Ace of Spades estimates from a user who wonders if Coppola thought it might not work well for the ayn Rand book remake to appeal to the martin Rand woke viewers and critics he wanted to please in his post,” Megaflopolis,” but perhaps only after many scenes had already been filmed.
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It’s a very well-shot, occasionally nicely directed complete failure where everyone’s, and I mean everyone’s dialog sounds like Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz dialogue from” Apocalypse Now”. ie. full of rambling pieces of poetry or plays that make them sound entirely intellectual, and all the way a midwit thinks geniuses speak.
Though a few individual scenes might work, it’s just a big mess.
The funniest part is that the protagonist is essentially a Trump/Elon Musk operative, while the antagonists are essentially Democrat politicians and antifa/blm operatives. Only Coppola, who is horrified, realizes this just as the film ends.
So he loads up faux-antifa with” Make New Rome Great Again” signs, and gives his Democrat standing some” Trump-speak “in the last few minutes but the cherry on the top is-
A children’s chorus delivers a New Globalist/Greentard Pledge of Allegiance to the Planet and has it printed IN BIG CAPITAL LETTERS on the screen.
*chef’s kiss*
It is the end in itself that is ideal.
Hilariously sad. Wait till it streams for” free” to see.
Another octogenarian superstar director recently experienced a similar circumstance. John Podhoretz discussed Leonardo DiCaprio’s potential miscastness in Martin Scorsese’s then-recent The Killers of the Flower Moon for contemporary PC-reasons in a January episode of the GloP podcast at Ricochet.
DiCaprio is figuratively 25 years too old for his part. He is playing a returning World War One veteran, and he is 48 years old!
* * * * * * **
You know It’s like, are you kidding me? And he was n’t supposed to play that part. That’s the great story of the movie! They were going to produce the film in the manner that David Grann’s book, which is about one of the FBI’s founding events, was written, was. A detective named Thomas Bruce White was sent to Oklahoma to look into this death spree in Osage County, Oklahoma, and he discovered that this family mafia was marrying and abducting women who had rights to land where oil was located, and that they were seizing these women primarily through marriage before abducting and then killing the women. And this incredible feat of investigative genius helped to create the FBI.
And DiCaprio was supposed to play that part. And then literally Black Lives Matter happens, and he and Scorsese look at each other and they’re like, we’re telling the wrong story! We’re telling a white savior story!
We ca n’t tell that. We must share a tale about the abominable and vicious behavior of Native Americans. And therefore, we have to turn this around, and not introduce the FBI until like two and a half hours into the movie. And then Leo, you’re still lead because you’re the reason we can sell the movie to Apple for$ 200 million.
You have to play the villain, who’s an idiot, unattractive character and uninteresting. And he’s like, okay! For three and a half hours, the film is then transformed into this tale about a moron and his vicious uncle abusing these Osage women, who they were supposed to like. Yeah, it’s a disgrace.
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The Horror. The Horror: Megalopolis Now
So did Coppola realize too late in shooting Megalopolis that he was creating a” Great Man” movie about an Elon Musk and Trump-like character in a time when leftists vehemently oppose the idea of Great Men? ( And Musk and Trump in particular, needless to say. ) If you’ve ever seen Hearts of Darkness, George Hickenlooper’s brilliant documentary about Coppola shooting Apocalypse Now in the Philippines, rewriting John Milius ‘ script each day, and improving the ending with Marlon Brando, you know what a tortured production Coppola put his crew and actors through. Yet miraculously, in spite of it all, Coppola emerged with one of the greatest war films ever made.
History does not repeat here, Megalopolis, with its great cast, fails the Gene Siskel test of a good movie very badly. Is this movie more interesting than a documentary featuring the same actors having lunch, as Stanley famously remarked? ” I ‘d , much rather watch a documentary of this cast hanging out with Coppola.
And speaking of documentaries, I’d love to see a version of Hearts of Darkness,  , or read a making of Megalopolis book that’s as meaty as Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy, ( which focused on Brian De Palma’s 1990 gargantuan flop PC-addled big screen adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities )  , to learn how much Coppola was improvising and rewriting, and making things up on the fly to shape his new movie. For its first three quarters, Jon Voight’s character seems like an obvious stand-in for Donald Trump. Voight, who is one of the few open Trump supporters in Hollywood, plays the richest man in New Rome, wearing a blonde wig that appears very Trump-like. A populist uprising is carried out by Shia LaBeouf, with Confederate and ( gasp! ) Confederate about three-quarters of the way through the movie.  , Betsy Ross flags prominently on display. ( Some of the rioters may be Philadelphia 76ers fans who traveled by NJ Transit through the city. )
Regarding the movie, left leaning architectural critic Josh Stephens described” The Brilliant, Unhinged Spectacle of Megalopolis:”  ,
Ayn Rand’s well-known screeds, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, contribute heartily to Catilina’s flimsy character: the brilliant, insufferable architect and the supergenius who invents a wonder material that can be used to heal bullet wounds, build skyscrapers, and power luminescent moving walkways. ( On that count, Catilina seems to have made a few trips to Wakanda. ) The distinction between Catilina and John Galt is that Howard Roak is truly benevolent, and he wants the masses to be helped by his products and designs. In other words, he’s delusional.
Coppola pays homage to Robert Caro, a fellow octogenarian. Catilina is presented as an alternative-reality version of Robert Moses: an inexplicably powerful, but unelected, city official. He looks like Frank Lloyd Wright as he purposefully ventures into the future while waving his cape. ( More accurately, Catilina is n’t so much an architect as he is a planner, materials scientist, and huge bore. ) He’s also awkward and dorky, disingenuously suave, and a fan of recreational drugs, and he wears every shade of black imaginable. Not unlike a certain obstinate industrialist, which we all are familiar with.
Essentially, Catilina proposes for New Rome an updated version of mid-20th century urban renewal—although it’s not clear whether Coppola actually supports slum clearance or is simply daydreaming. Not coincidentally, he would have survived and clearly recalls the time of the great bulldozings. At best, Catilina’s plan is a metaphor for human creativity and unattainable benevolence. His other quirk is that he can stop time, which is a metaphor for the fact that humans cannot, in fact, stop time.  ,
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In his review of the” Incoherently idealistic” Megalopolis at the Bulwark, Sonny Bunch wrote:
Crassus’s other nephew, Clodio, is played by Shia LaBeouf as a sort of cross-dressing Donald Trump double, rousing the rabble and indulging in populist rhetoric to do … something. Despite Clodio’s villainy, it’s easy to argue that this film’s politics are fairly straightforward fascist tale about the need for a brilliant leader to lead the dull masses and the corrupt elite out of the muck and into a brighter future, democracy be damned.
The Original” Perfect School-City”
It really is. Beyond his mystical and largely unexplained” Megalon” MacGuffin, Catilina is basically a futuristic version of Le Corbusier, who in the 1920s proposed leveling Paris to create his own version of what Catilina describes in Megalopolis as his” perfect school-city:”  ,
Charles-Edouard Jeannet, better known as Le Corbusier, was one of the 20th century’s more formidable architects. The Villa Savoye, High Court of Chandigarh, Unité d’Habitation, Notre Dame du Haut, and others still remain iconic. But his greatest ( in terms of influence, be it good or bad ) legacy lies in urban planning, in both public housing and imagining a car-filled city.
His urban planning ideas were to quite simply, as William JR Curtis notes in Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms“, save the industrial city from disaster.”
And what did Paris in the early 1920s have in mind this savior? Total destruction of several square miles on the Right Bank including one of Paris’s most popular neighborhoods—the Marais. And in its place, 18 glass towers.
A gridded phalanx of 18 cruciform office towers spread over several square miles would take the place of the then-disease-plagued Marais ( which was historically its Jewish quarter ). The towers would sit in a multi-tiered park. An enormous amount of green space was present at one level. Another level was for transportation. Even an airport was a part of the designs. In the northern corners of the river and along the river, there are tall residential and government structures.
Utopian thinking was intertwined with architecture. Le Corbusier, an architect, attempted to build uniform, concrete monoliths by demolishing large swathes of Paris.
” We must create a mass-production state of mind … a state of mind for living in mass-production housing. “pic. twitter.com/0j5dbEQjOM
— Culture Critic (@Culture_Crit ) June 18, 2024
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Corbu wanted to flatten Paris ‘ Jewish quarter? I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the” Progressive “modern architect was described in 2015 as an” outright fascist” by Xavier de Jarcy and Francois Chaslin, his French biographers:
Mr Jarcy said that in” Plans” Le Corbusier wrote in support of Nazi anti-Semitism and in” Prelude” co-wrote” hateful editorials”.
In August 1940, the architect wrote to his mother that” money, Jews ( partly responsible ), Freemasonry, all will feel just law”. In October that year, he added:” Hitler can crown his life with a great work: the planned layout of Europe.”
Mr Chaslin said he had unearthed” anti-Semite sketches” by Le Corbusier, and ascertained that the French architect had spent 18 months in Vichy, where the Nazis ran a French puppet government, where he kept an office.
The Le Corbusier Foundation, which works to promote the architect’s memory and works, barely touches on this side of his life, relegating his Vichy role to an” extended stay “in the town.
Corbusier only completed two buildings in the US with his stamp on them. He and his design team at Yale’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts building in 1962 both participated in the architectural committee that designed the UN building in 1948.  , However, Corbusier’s urban planning concepts were enormously influential on American urban renewal in the 1950s and ‘ 60s, with invariably disastrous results. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a groundbreaking work by Jane Jacobs from 1961, is essentially a real-world refutation of his architectural and urban planning fantasies.
Apologies for the architectural tangent. Getting back to filmmaking, in the 1970s, Coppola had one of the most brilliant and sustained runs of any major director, winning the Oscar for co-writing Patton,  , and then directing The Conversation,  , Apocalypse Now, and of course, the first two Godfather movies. Regarding those last two films, Podhoretz writes:
As it stands, he will always be remembered for his two best-ever motion pictures. Either he accepted that he would never be able to do anything even slightly better and was therefore determined to put his life on the line in areas where he had no real gift, or he is a complete failure in all areas. Or he went off his meds.
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 , The insanity that is Megalopolis, despite being one from the heart ( in more ways than one ), leans strongly towards that conclusion. Still though, in an era of largely interchangeable spaceship and superhero sequels, as Sonny Bunch writes:
Megalopolis  is n’t a good movie, precisely because I believe it fails on both standard storytelling and airy metaphor. However, I’m happy to know that the thousands of dollars of Coppola Merlot I’ve spent over the years contributed in some small ways to the creation of this obscene monstrosity.
You might also want to pour yourself a few sizable glasses of Coppola’s wine to celebrate the fact that one of the great directors of the 1970s is still producing films, the other just to see what he has accomplished without Mario Puzo or John Milius pitching in first at the typewriter.