Hey, I’m back! Trying to re-insert “writing words about things” into my lifestyle again. I’d meant to do One Last Best of Comic TV Awards Show, but two podcasts and a full-time job where, for the first time since 2012, watching TV at work was impossible made that a challenge. I mean, not having seen the final season of The Flash is one thing, but I’m a whole season behind on Superman and Lois, and that one stayed good apparently!
Look… sometimes we put our hearts and souls into a thing and it doesn’t work out. Our best intentions lead to ruin, our every effort crumbles in execution, we paused the YouTube we were watching to go to the bathroom and two paragraphs later we haven’t moved yet– okay excuse me a second
Which brings us to Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating passion project Megalopolis.
Frankie Ford has had this movie in the back of his head since his pal George Lucas debuted his own passion project, Star Wars. He was developing the script when the last movie he gambled everything on, One From the Heart, crashed and burned and forced him to do work-for-hire stuff for the studios like Jack, Google it. And after years of scraping together money by running a celebrity winery, he finally banked the $120 million he needed to make this movie on his own, free of studio interference. A long-gestating passion project from the maker of The Godfather, one of the greatest films of the 20th century.
And maybe that’s our greatest extant argument for studio interference, because hoo golly, readers, Megalopolis has some issues.
But they say that an interesting failure is better than a boring success, and I’d agree with that. Boyhood, for example, is an objective success. Richard Linklater shot one movie over 12 years, watching his lead character grow from little more than a toddler to a stoned-philosopher college student, it was hugely buzzed about to the point of getting nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars and winning Supporting Actress for Patricia Arquette (but a little too late to keep her from signing on to CSI: Cyber), and believe me when I tell you that I would rewatch Megalopolis five times in a row before I’d rewatch Boyhood even once, because for all its success, Boyhood is so… nothing. He spent 12 years writing it and forgot to give it any sort of throughline, and miss me with that “It’s your story, my story, everyone’s story” marketing nonsense, because no it’s not, I did not relate to even one scene, my mother dated zero men who became abusive drunks as soon as they moved in together, let alone three.
And while Megalopolis misses the mark more than it doesn’t, man, it is swinging for the fences, it is doing things most movies wouldn’t even attempt, and that makes it a fascinating failure.
And that’s why I want to break it down with y’all today. What it tries to do, what it succeeds at, what it fails to accomplish, why you weren’t wrong to skip it in theatres, and why I’d see it again instead of the year’s most successful movie, Inside Out 2, which I generally liked and do think is better in most quantifiable regards.
(But not Deadpool and Wolverine or Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, two movies I’ve already seen twice in theatres and frankly could go for a third round, look, I’m not perfect)
Disclaimer: as will become obvious pretty fast, this is not what you’d call an endorsement of the movie on its own merits.
Before we get into it, allow me to introduce a few other Legendary Flops I’ll be using as reference points.
Cats: We all know this one. The film version of the mega-successful Broadway musical that could not have missed every mark more with a map and a mission statement. A dismal failure at the box-office and punchline for the entire internet that I didn’t enjoy for even a minute but thought about every day for six months.
Babylon: A three-hour drug-fueled nightmare odyssey through Hollywood’s transformation in the late 20s/early 30s that seems to be about the dawn of the sound era but is actually about the takeover of Hollywood by the conservative right, and we’re talking the conservative right of the 1930s, conservatives who’d call Mitch McConnell a communist dilletante. Should have made $500 million worldwide and gotten nominated for Best Picture, managed neither ’cause y’all weren’t ready.
The Flash: A $200 million movie that wasn’t anyone’s passion project, it was a studio mandate that they were getting done come hell or high water because someone was convinced that they couldn’t reboot the Snyderverse into something new, something maybe less alienating to mass audiences, without a narrative explanation. Personally I love it but I admit I’m in the minority so hey come on let’s not fight about it.
Madame Web: The fourth movie of the SPUMC (Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters), asked to follow the incredible failure that was Morbius (perhaps the only studio tentpole to bomb twice in one year), a film where it seems impossible anyone working on it cared even a little. I haven’t seen it (yet), but I’ve seen the takes, the memes, and I’ve had its many failures explained by both Nando V Movies and Amanda the Jedi, so I feel safe referencing it.
And among all of these, we’ll dig into Megalopolis, a movie too competent to be Cats, to incoherent to be Babylon, too filled with passion and good intent to be Madame Web, too original and utterly divorced from the IP game to be The Flash.
Let’s begin.
Next page: Story, question mark