MEGALOPOLIS Review: Was it worth it?
The pillars of the history of the seventh art have been cemented by dreamers with a vision doomed to failure. Men and women who persevered in bringing their vision forward so that their ideas would become reality, even at the cost of great sacrifices. Throughout the more than one hundred years since the creation of cinema, the industry has been nourished by these stories of overcoming and perseverance that have enriched the epic and legend surrounding the films.
Without a doubt, Francis Ford Coppola belongs to a generation of filmmakers where taking a vision forward was synonymous with great deeds and sacrifices. The director has written his name in gold letters in the Olympus of filmmakers, and despite having achieved the immortality that only the world of cinema can grant to mortals, his image in the modern world has been left as that of a filmmaker from the past, who seems not to fit in this boring modern era in which more and more cinemas are closing, the cities of the world have been relegated to being mere showcases for franchises, and everything in the audiovisual world seems programmed and rarely does an original surprise come along that manages to sneak into the hearts of the increasingly less attentive spectators in a lasting way.
It could be said that in a way, Megalopolis symbolizes all of this, a science fiction fable told through the prism of ancient Rome, set in an imaginary United States, in which the visions between Caesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian and idealistic future, and his opponent, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), collide in a hecatomb of greed, ambition, and blind ideals for the destiny of the nation.
A dream project by the director that has been brewing for decades, and that has arrived in an era in which the director himself has been forced to finance it by selling part of his vineyards, risking his fortune on a vision that only he believed in, and that even after its realization, ran into all kinds of inconveniences to be released, even having to struggle to find distribution.
As the image that illustrates this article, in which Adam Driver appears looking into the void from the top of a skyscraper, the project was a leap into the void, and making a parallel with the plot of the film, the intentions of the filmmaker were to stop time, and to revolutionize the industry again with am idealistic vision that he considered innovative.
However, this audiovisual daring ended in a resounding failure with critics and the public, only grossing around 13 million against the 120 million budget.
Megalopolis is a pompous, visually ambitious work, guided by unusual pedantry, in an uncontrolled exercise of megalomania, by a director with an enviable self-confidence, but fails in his quest to create an epic that manages to create something truly commendable, getting lost in a succession of poor digital effects, and a disjointed script that ends up becoming an empty and grandiloquent spectacle that sinks in its pretensions of becoming a work of genius. I´m afraid that the only revelation that the film has to offer is that nowadays the most interesting Coppola is the one named Sophia, not Francis.
On the other hand, the cast chosen by Francis follows the lead of its director, helping to raise the level of production, giving its characters a dignity that in the hands of other less capable actors could have ended in disaster, creating characters that hover around that disjointed universe that possibly only made sense in the director’s head.
But was it worth it?
This leads me to reflect in a speech by Charles Bukowski in which the writer claimed that true artists are those who starve for their art, because there´s no real artist in the world that does not believe that they have the talent to carry on with that penitence.
Megalopolis has been vilified, doomed to failure even before its release, and it is certain that it will not win any major awards, but honestly, what are awards but frivolous acts of vanity by a wealthy elite that, with them, a few privileged people see themselves with the right to tell the rest of us mortals how to live or how to think?
The real award is to endure over time, to make the artist’s work transcend even the artist himself, and Francis with his remarkable career has achieved that with flying colors. It would be too unfair not to appreciate Francis‘ effort to bring his vision to life.
What place will Megalopolis occupy in history? It is still too early to know, the only thing certain is that cinema is something subjective, films have different meanings for each one of us, and perhaps with time, someone in the near future will discover it and give it a new meaning that we cannot appreciate.
Was it worth it, then?
Possibly for Francis it was… Because there is nothing worse in this life than seeing your dreams wither away without being realized.
Megalopolis is available on Prime Video and other digital platforms such as APPLE TV and VUDU
