I Survived MEGALOPOLIS And All I Got Was This Weird Time Disease

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I went to see MEGALOPOLIS and I can’t stop thinking about it.

In this letter:

• A counter to what you may have read about Francis Ford Coppola’s MEGALOPOLIS

• The News

ORBITAL

MEGALOPOLIS (2024)

It was me and maybe six other people in the auditorium. MEGALOPOLIS was playing for a whole two days in Southend, and I got the second-to-last screening.

You’ve been told it’s awful. I watched the trailers and avoided as many other stories about the film as I could, but I still saw the headlines about its reception.

My first thought on leaving the cinema was: this was the cinema that made Coppola.  The bones of the film come from the 1930s-1950s, to my untrained eye.  But there are parts of Sixties filmmaking in there, Fellini, flashes of Seventies experimental filmmaking, some Eighties excess and a touch of No Wave, Nineties sleaze and 2000s lighting.  I saw a few moments of underwater Guy Maddin, some Saul Bass, bursts of early Hollywood, a screwball comedy meet-cute, flashes of various experimental directors.  Theatre. Shakespeare.  Performance styles from various different eras rubbing up against each other. Dustin Hoffman doing a noir heavy next to Shia LaBeouf doing his neo-Nicolas Cage shamanic thing as Clodius. There’s newspapers and old-timey press packs with old cameras, and Nathalie Emmanuel whispering into a digital recording ring.

It’s most of a century of film mixed together and named a fable.

A Roman parable shone through THE FOUNTAINHEAD. The Roman name choices are odd, by the way. Cicero was not exactly a small-time peddler of casinos: although Cicero did claim Catilina had killed his first wife. Catilina’s second marriage was for love, which was somewhat against noble Roman standards of the time (if you see the film, you’ll know the line I’m referring to). Catilina was prosecuted for corruption by Clodius. Cicero’s time as consul does reflect some of what Frank Cicero says in MEGALOPOLIS, including at least one actual Cicero rant - it may have helped that I’ve been reading a book covering this period of Roman history over the last couple of months. But Catalina also tried to have Cicero killed and stage a coup d’etat. This is Cicero as consul and Catalina (and the Design Authority) as tribune/aedile revolutionary. I could go on, but suffice to say there’s a great deal of remixing Roman history in here, and a great deal of what you see is related to things that actually happened back then.

Anyway! Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), head of the Design Authority in New Rome, has invented a new form of construction matter called Megalon, and won a Nobel for it. What nobody knows is that Catalina has somehow gained the ability to stop time. He envisions using Megalon to create a new utopian Megalopolis over New Rome, but Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) sees no reason to completely destabilise the city when it’s hard enough to keep the status quo running and maintain the flow of money for basic services.

As I was watching, I was reminded of the work of architect Eugene Tsui, who proposes what he called “biologic” design and wrote a book called “Evolutionary Architecture: Nature as a Basis for Design.” I actually own a copy of this:

It’s a bit dented, but I’ve had it 25 years.

The weird flow of Tsui’s work came to mind - the Megalon constructions in the film fall somewhere between that and some of Neri Oxman’s Mediated Matter group’s thoughts.

There is in fact a lot in here that will remind you of other things. In some senses it’s a container for everything Coppola has seen and thought about his entire life.

There is some janky CGI.  There are also wonderful, glowing collages.

There was what seemed to be an egregious bit of ADR where Esposito voices the word “country” when his lips seem clearly to be saying “city.” There’s a fully Sixties drug freak-out using only physical effects and lit like a John Wick film.

(There are a couple of other physical effects that are inspired and fully surprising.)

The casting is peculiar. I mean, Adam Driver is peculiar in everything.  A leading man who contorts his face into ugliness so much.  He carries the cachet of the Serious Actor despite having made a great many unserious films, and a leading man despite lacking what you would ordinarily call leading man looks.  (It was said of Barbra Streisand’s presence that she did not look like a leading lady but her charisma and personality meant she could convince you that she could have anyone she liked.) Wonderful Aubrey Plaza is an actor you immediately distrust in everything. Since no character is drawn in more than two dimensions, you just have to sit back and enjoy her panto-villain bit. And her hypnodomme turn is both bizarre and redolent of old crime movies (THE WOMAN IN GREEN comes to mind).

Nathalie Emmanuel is from Southend-on-Sea, and we never talk shit about anyone from the Thames Delta. She’s fine in a thankless role: it did seem like all the women in the film are there to either test or uplift the men, which flattens the film even though I guess can be seen as very Roman (but you do wonder if she might have a snarky comedy actor hiding in her).

Laurence Fishburne, in the role of a Roman freedman historian, gives it his best voice-of-God. He was fourteen when he made his first film with Coppola. He’s sixty-four next year.

There are testing over-long scenes, and I found myself wishing Coppola had cut a lot of the Circus Maximus stuff and put the money into the last-act riot scenes instead, so it didn’t look like the city-wide unrest was happening on one single street.

The structure of the thing, always bent and wobbly, comes apart in the last twenty minutes or so. Even while watching it, one suspects there’s an extended cut hiding in this film that shores up the last-act shenanigans. Which can’t be right, as Coppola surely spent a hundred and twenty mill of his own money to release the cut he wanted.

But.

It is full of ideas. Over-full, sure, but who cares. The politics are sloppy, the symbolism is all over the place, the actors are performing in five different movies, everything stops dead early on while Adam Driver does five minutes of Hamlet, and who cares. It reaches for something. Something monumental. Its abiding message is not in the film, it’s about the film: it says “this is what I have learned about my artform, this is its history and this is where it could go. This is all I know and all I dream.”

I want to watch it two or three more times, at least. I will have to wait for a Blu-Ray.

I’m not going to tell you it’s a great film. On some simple shallow levels it may not even be a good film. But it’s all I’ve been able to think about all week and I want to watch it many more times. That, for me, makes it a compelling and valuable and, yes, entertaining film.

If you don’t like your art awash with human ambition and a deep pool of excessive madness, then there’ll be a new Captain America film along soon. MEGALOPOLIS, flawed though it may be, is the shit I live for.

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast. Forthcoming 2024: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, FELL: FERAL CITY new printing. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition.

And now. She’s been busy as a Grammy-nominated designer and completing a magnificent new book with Le Destroy, but she’s coming back to Orbital Operations to tell us:

This is available as a print from the lordess.io store.

Technically, this one is Old News: I bought this from her when she first opened her store. New News to come. She wanted to provide new News this week, but I told her not to, because she’s on the road tomorrow.

Are you at NYCC this coming week? Lordess Foudre is there on Thursday doing a panel with Le Destroy. 330pm, Room 408. Go and see her.

SENILE

I HAVE NO IDEA

I was clearing a corner of the office and found a few of these t-shirts in a bag from my management office:

Was I even at San Diego in 2010? I don’t think so. I have no idea what these shirts were made for. I was probably working with Legendary around that time: I used to talk to Thomas Tull, the founder of Legendary, who was an absolute riot. There was one surreal moment when I took a call from him which he led with something like “Sorry I’m calling late, I was arranging to build a city.” He was such a lovely guy, one of those rare live-wires of enthusiasm. I hope he’s doing well.

I’m so glad I kept these shirts, even if they confuse me. I really have no clue why they exist.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

Notes on the book LENIN ON THE TRAIN

Camel Balls

We had the Northern Lights

On Herzog’s OF WALKING IN ICE

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv and:

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Please come back next week for more well-meaning gibberish. In the meantime, sit down somewhere warm with a book and a good drink for a bit and let yourself just be you and just be content. Everything’s going to be all right.

W