So much is happening but also nothing?
Plots can be simple, yet lead to a chaotic story. Babylon has four different arcs happening, while the real story is being told just as much through the parties everyone’s attending. It’s a lot of throughlines to keep track of, especially when some are getting more screentime than others. Madame Web was rewriting its story all the way into post-production (allegedly to reduce the amount of Spider-Man in this Spider-Man spinoff), but lacked the budget for reshoots, leading to half the movie being clumsy ADR. As a result, at a moment when the villain controls and is scouring every camera in the city looking for her, Madame Web drives a stolen car through New York to an airport and comfortably books a flight to Peru so she can investigate why said villain was in the Amazon with her mom when she was studying spiders right before she died. It’s a mess scrambled together in the editing room.
Megalopolis is a different kind of mess. So much happens, but so little of it matters? Here’s some things that happen over the slightly more than two hours, each one containing an interesting idea that vanishes like smoke minutes later.
Cicero and Cesar have a public debate (Roman senate style) about how New Rome should develop: Cesar’s utopia, or Cicero’s casinos. Cesar wins, because the Development Authority can apparently demolish and rebuild neighbourhoods at will as long as bank CEO Hamilton Crassus III ( who is also Cesar’s wealthy uncle) keeps the money coming. But what’s baffling is that to make his point about not letting the now distract from the forever, he opens by reciting the entire “To be or not to be” speech from Hamlet, and… why? I don’t… why. The division between spending on short-term gains or long-term benefits, that’s a real thing causing real problems throughout the developed world. Spending public money on mega-arenas for wealthy corporations when infrastructure is crumbling, throwing money at the police to clear out homeless encampments when every study and test-case proves that the cheapest and most effective solution to homelessness is just… giving them homes. This scene is ultimately more about introducing our core ensemble, the rivalry between Cesar and Cicero, which they kick off with a Shakespeare monologue about pondering suicide.
Don’t ask how Shakespeare existed and wrote Hamlet in a world where New York is also ancient Rome, I told you, we’re not doing worldbuilding questions, it’s a fable, innit.
Cesar’s mistress, TV presenter Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) confesses her love for Cesar, only for him to reply “Never marry for love,” to which she says “Note taken” and marries Crassus for his money. The wedding is held at a blend of Madison Square Garden and the Roman Colosseum and features a performance by pop star Vesta Sweetwater, an impossible to miss reference to Vesta, virginial Roman goddess and mistress of the Vestal Virgins. Basically all of New Rome is invested in her continued virginity, to the point of having an auction to become literally financially invested in it (what?). But Crassus’ ambitious nephew Clodio, who’s mad that Julia now prefers building things with his cousin Cesar to partying at the club with Clodio and his sisters, has a scheme. He slips a video into the stadium/colosseum AV system of Cesar sleeping with the teenage popstar in order to knock Cesar off his pedestal. And sure, that’s such a shock to the crowds that it sparks a riot and leads to Cesar’s arrest, not that he notices, as he was in the middle of a drug trip filmed so bizarrely that Hunter S. Thompson rose from the grave saying “Okay bring it down.”
But anyway one or two scenes later Julia proves that Vesta a) isn’t American, she’s from Europe; b) isn’t 16, she’s in her 20s; and c) the video was doctored anyway. Charges are dropped, Crassus threatens to do something unpleasant if he finds out Clodio was behind it (which goes nowhere), Vesta quickly rebrands herself as a more openly sexualized punk rock singer, we never mention any of this again. Julia’s only competitor for Cesar’s affection is the memory of his dead wife.
And again there is an interesting and valuable idea here. How purity culture is just a different way society commodifies young women and girls’ sexuality, it’s just more openly about control over it and them. In seven minutes Vesta does a full Miley Cyrus, going from sweet, innocent Hannah Montana era Miley to modern “I own my body, thanks so much” Miley in an instant. Sexy Punk Vesta isn’t more sexualized than Virgin Vesta had been, just more honestly and with more autonomy for Vesta. And yet this is portrayed as one of the pillars of New Rome collapsing, because purity culture needs to see itself as the line between decent society and barbarism or what have they been doing with their lives. A good point of discussion that I feel I’ve spent more time on than the movie does.
An old Soviet satellite (no questions about the worldbuilding, chat, it’s a fable) hits the city, leaving an entire swath of downtown a crater. I guess there could be a theme here about how the future is always endangered by forgotten relics from the past (witness democracy once again being threatened by creeping fascism basically everywhere), but we somehow spend the least amount of time on this. Basically the crater provides an excellent spot for Cesar to build Megalopolis (although not enough of one given he still needs to demolish at least one more low-income housing development), is used to explain why Dustin Hoffman isn’t in the movie anymore, and then never comes up again.
Cesar loses his ability to freeze time, I think just after his goddamn weird drug trip at Madison Square Colosseum, then Julia says “Ah, come on, give it another try” and he has it back. Absolute narrative cul-de-sac but again, this power is never really about pushing the story, I think maybe it’s about art and creation being an attempt to escape the flow of time, but being stuck in a moment keeps you from the future? Hard to know. Coppola does basically nothing with it until the final shot.
Clodio’s henchman hires a kid to shoot Cesar in the face, angering Clodio because he wanted a scandal, not a martyr. Don’t worry, he’s fine, turns out Megalon isn’t just for buildings or invisibility dresses (didn’t even have time to get into that), it can also heal a seemingly fatal head wound so thoroughly that after a scene or two of needing a lot of gauze and clearly seeming to have brain damage, Cesar is back to normal and doesn’t even have a scar.
The story beats that do matter, one of which includes another good theme, are that Wow Platinum-Crassus attempts to seize control of the banks via Clodio, and Clodio attempts to rule all Metropolis by convincing mobs of people angry that Megalopolis is being built on the ruins of their former homes that he, Clodio, is a man of the people who stands with them, and wouldn’t it be cool if we all ganged up against Cesar. Good stuff in here about the danger of rage-baiting populist movements, how at the center of them there’s almost always a selfish billionaire working the situation for his own benefit, and how riding the mob for personal gain only works until they turn on you. Even if Coppola remains devoted to being apolitical so stops short of MAGA-coding Clodio’s “man of the people” act. It’s ultimately a minor part of this movie about a time-freezing architect who just wants to build his passion project but the man keeps getting in his way, but it’s an interesting one.
Shame the actor it’s shackled to brings us to our next point.
Next page: who’s who
