What the actual Hell
Okay. So. The weirdest thing about Megalopolis. Right after New Rome’s Upper East Side is reduced to ash by a falling satellite, Cesar holds a press conference. In the purest form of this movie, a live actor emerges from the audience you are sitting in to ask Cesar a question, which he responds to.
That’s… that’s weird. I don’t have to explain that. This is a choice designed almost exclusively for the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, to get people talking about how bold and unique Francis’ vision is, and has given zero thought to how this would be done at the AMC in Boise, let alone on Prime Video in November. Is Coppola going to come to my house and act it out himself? Am I going to be cued to read out subtitles?
And the question I have, since I wasn’t any of the handful of IMAX theatres in big US cities screening “the ultimate version” with the live actor, have I even seen that entire exchange? There was one question from an offscreen voice. If there had been an usher reading from a script, would that scene have addressed that space junk just blew up a huge chunk of New Rome? I simply do not know.
It’s choices like this that alienate audiences, but it’s also what makes it such an object of curiosity.
And that is all over Megalopolis. Coppola doesn’t just have a message (spelled out in the end by him presenting a new Pledge of Allegiance for humanity, I’m not kidding, that literally happens, that’s a real thing), he’s trying to do something different. He’s been wanting to tell this story since he was in a jungle filming Apocalypse Now, he is leaving nothing on the table, this might be the last movie he ever makes so by God it is going to start conversations, and you don’t do that by just trying to get on base.
The thing that makes a cinematic failure interesting is big swings, as we were just discussing last page. Like, the failure of Morbius isn’t interesting. It’s a lazy, dull, ugly movie that tried to con audiences into thinking this origin story for a C-list character was directly tied to the MCU Spider-Man movies when it simply was not.
The thing that makes Madame Web interesting as a failure where Argylle is not is how obvious it was that huge swaths of the movie were rewritten after filming, and instead of paying for reshoots they plopped the villain into a sound booth, gave him a new script to read, and told the editors “just make it work.” To abuse our “big swing” metaphor, in this case the batter isn’t even swinging for the ball, he’s trying to kneecap the umpire, but it still got people talking.
Babylon opens with Manny, one of our main protagonists, trying to get an elephant to a giant studio party, and this involves a POV shot of the elephant loosing its bowels in agitation right towards us and right onto Manny’s fellow labourer. “Strap in,” the movie tells us, “This is gonna be messy.” That leads to some unhinged party scene long-shots that should be studied in film school for how crazed and ambitious they get, the first 20 minutes of Babylon are an absolute roller coaster that will tell you exactly how well you’re gonna vibe with the following two and a half hours. Big swings that work.
And then in the end, decades after leaving Hollywood, Manny comes back to LA and watches a showing of Singing in the Rain. At first he’s moved to tears by comedy beats that echo the tragedies his friends went through twenty years earlier, but then there’s a montage of film history, decades of cinema summed up in fleeting clips, seemingly saying “You all did it, protagonists, you were part of something great that will keep going long after you.” A montage that ends with a clip from Avatar. Huh. Weird choice. So everything Manny went through was worth it because James Cameron made Avatar? Is that the takeaway? That lost some people I saw this with.
Big swing that maybe fouled out.
The Flash has some of the funniest and most heartbreaking moments of any superhero movie I’ve seen since at least Avengers: Endgame, look I wish I’d picked a better example too but I stand by it, and that’s why I muscle through some visual effects that make Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania look like Avatar: The Way of Water, that one makes perfect sense it’s your fault if you don’t get it. But I understand that many aren’t prepared to do that.
And Cats… everything about Cats fascinates me. Cats failed on nearly every level a film can fail at. It tried to be grounded and realistic in its musical cabaret about weird cats having a singing contest to see who gets to die via hot air balloon. It turned human actors into partially CG uncanny valley monstrosities instead of just being a goddamn cartoon. It turned songs written for two or three part harmonies into solos so they could go to big names, even if maybe that big name wasn’t good casting. It hinges the entire thing on Macavity even though the emotional climax is and always will be Grizabella. It’s a failure on every level and that’s why it haunts me so much more thoroughly than a movie that’s simply bad, like Assassin’s Creed, which I know I’ve seen but could not describe at gunpoint.
Maybe a fascinating failure isn’t your cup of tea. Maybe seeing a once-great director bet everything on black only to learn this isn’t even a roulette wheel isn’t your idea of a good time. But man alive, it was mine. I may not have enjoyed all (or most?) of this movie, but unpacking it has been the bright point of my week, and I’d pick a rewatch of this in IMAX with a bored concession worker doing the press conference scene over Joker: Folie a Deux in a heartbeat.
If you disagree… have you seen The Beekeeper yet? Jason Statham beats up tech bros, Equalizer style, that’s a good time.
