Saw this tonite at a mostly-empty theatre. It's leaving theatres soon after a short run. I was hoping to catch it in IMAX but it's already out of IMAX.
The last Coppola movie I saw was Apocalypse Now. Parts of Apocalypse Now are unbelievable in terms of the chaos. The movie is disturbing but also, a black comedy, so it's disturbing in the right way, but you have to have empathy to begin with or you may understand it wrongly. Anyways, it's a complicated movie. I am unable to watch The Godfather movies because they disturb me too much (I have seen some parts of some of them.)
This week a coworker mentioned that there is a cute robot movie doing gangbusters and that Megalopolis flopped. I first learned about Megalopolis in The Guardian, and how there was a pretty mixed reaction (I think at Cannes or something), that The Studio (whoever that is) was not sure what to do with it, and so on. All this really made me want to see it. I was not surprised it flopped but also now I am quite curious about the cute robot movie.
Well, I like most movies better than this movie.
I had expectations of a kind of garbled incomprehensible trainwreck and was keen for that. It is sort-of that, which is a good thing, for me at least. So: that part is good.
Where this movie excells is in it's mad vision of Rome recreated in modernity. This has been done before-- for instance, the Mirror Universe in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine-- but these recreations usually stop at the sadomasochist sexual excess and power. But this goes past that somehow, and you have to love it for that.
You might have heard that the movie is filled with vivid imagery. This is not true, or at a stretch it's true but not specific enough. It's filled with interesting, creative framing. This is also very good. By framing here I mean the specific way certain things are shot, the way images are juxtaposed (there is a ton of sort of shadow-puppetry vibe), the way cheap visual effects like glow and so on are caked on strongly.
Another high point is just the cast. What you have to understand about Megalopolis is that by the end everyone is basically just hamming it up and in this way, the movie gets much better as it goes along. It knows it is a "fable" which is very distinct from an "epic". It's surreal and full of quirky details. Every person on screen is someone you love to see, I would say, and they are not being reined in at all.
So as I write, it's clear to me there are lots of good things and it's good that this movie got made.
Here's why I don't like it that well. First, and maybe last, the cinematography. This is why "vivid imagery" is not specific enough. This movie just looks bad. It's shot mostly open, in camera terms. In almost every scene there is not much to look at except a character's face-- everything else is just blurred to oblivion. The problem is that it keeps this same approach for almost every shot. So there is nothing to look at except the person talking.
The movie is also almost completely devoid of wide angles, so everything just feels cramped. This might relate to what was actually built in terms of sets-- i.e., if you shoot a scene on a wide angle, you need a lot of stuff to look good. But if you shoot narrow, you can have a smaller stage. But I don't feel like this was a super cheap movie to make, it's more like it was made to look cheap by bad cinematography.
In wider shots, where you might want to look at other things, it's still shot wide open, so the things you might look at tend to just be out of focus.
Even the framing of the characters can be off, for instance one scene was really painful to watch: there is a closeup of a character talking (almost all dialogue is delivered in closeups or medium shots) and the background is completely blurred out, but there is another character in the room behind them, doing... something. You can't tell who, or what, it's just a distracting, moving blob right by their head. In another scene, two characters are talking, and the "left" character is framed to the left, but the "right" character is framed sorta... just barely right of center. There's no reason for this, it's just like the camera is not pointed in the right direction.
In other parts the framing is alright, it's just... what are they even doing overall here.
I'm coming at this as an idiot amateur photographer, i.e., armchair generaling, and I feel a sense that if I were to look up the cinematographer(s) on this movie they would probably be amazing and I'd be just not getting it, but still, I see a lot of movies at the theatre and they basically all look better than Megalopolis. You should see it, but it actually probably works better if you watch it on a smaller screen. Maybe Coppola had that in mind?
Complimenting this, some of the "set dressing" is a bit starchy for me. What I mean by that is that spaces look contrived, for instance one scene with two computer screens side-by-side, they look basically like normal dell screens with some image on them-- fine enough. But they are lined up so precicely and (again, when in focus) the cinematography makes sure you really notice them, instead of for instance halfway cutting them out of frame. There is one scene with a gloriously messy apartment, but even in the messy apartment scene, the clothes are strewn sort-of uniformly.
One other way the movie falls down, but this isn't too important, is sometimes it kind of trips over itself combining modernity with plot. That is, it's presenting plot points with such a stylized framing, that sometimes it doesn't convey the plot very well. But anyways-- this is really more the "incoherent trainwreck" part, which is a plus for me, but I think if people leave feeling confused this might be why. You walk away with, "wow they were just balancing on some I-beams way up high" not "they had a moment in their relationship."
At the start of the movie, I was sort of internally laughing at some details, like the presence of newspapers in an age of advanced technology. I thought, "Coppola is old. He thinks people read paper newspapers." But it's not the case, the thing is just deliberately arbitrary. Oh-- there is precisely one shot where a smartphone appears onscreen, for only a moment, like a second. God bless that.
By the end, I realized that this is, fundamentally, an intentionally silly movie with a good message, great actors, creative framing, interesting scenarios and lots of quirky details. I was expecting more an "epic" than a "fable", and that's on me.
Sure, there were only ten or so people in the theatre with me, but by halfway we were all openly laughing at some parts, and I think in the right spirit. I probably like it more than I'm giving myself credit for, but anyways-- watch it on a phone. No, I mean it.