Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) invested $120 million of his own pocket to realize a passion project he’s had in mind since the ’70s: the sci-fi epic Megalopolis. It’s about the United States as an empire and big ideas within it Author’s film in the guise of a blockbuster.
While the film has now found a German home with distributor Constantin, the US studios are still finding it difficult to trust the project. It is now a little more obvious why. First Reactions from the Cannes Film Festival bear witness to an extremely controversial work.
Sci-fi epic Megalopolis: disaster or masterpiece?
Moviepilot editor-in-chief Jenny Jecke was there in Cannes and called Megalopolis “a unique cinema experience in today’s film landscape, definitely worth seeing, highly topical and outdated at the same time.” At the same time she attests to Coppola “crazy film zeal”which is not different from “creative deficiencies of the current blockbuster system” can be defeated.
On the positive side of the review spectrum also agrees David Ehrlich of IndieWire, who considers Megalopolis to be much more than a film:
Megalopolis – at its brightest and boldest moments – bursts through the screen to bridge the gap between life and thought, art and reality. […] Like so much of this film, the setting in question does not show us the future of cinema, but rather strengthens our desire for it to have one.
Bilge Ebiri from New York Magazine considers the film to be similarly important:
It is clear that Megalopolis […] is not a normal film. It’s too big a leap, one formally and visually bold experimentwhich feels like the work of a filmmaker who, rather than repeating himself ad infinitum or resting on his countless laurels, remains excited by moving images and their infinite possibilities.
Constantine
Megalopolis
Of course, a project that goes so far out of the window will never receive a unanimously positive response. This is how you can do it on the side of the cracks find equally passionately arguing critics. For example, Kevin Maher from the British Times:
It’s 138 stultifying minutes with half-baked themes, half-finished scenes, Fingernails-on-the-blackboard actingword salad dialogues and ugly visuals that seem to be looking for a story that isn’t there.
In his 2-star review, Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian writes similarly puzzled:
For me it is a Heart project without a heart: a bloated, boring, baffling, superficial film full of textbook truths about the future of humanity. It’s simultaneously hyperactive and lifeless, ponderous with some terrible acting and uninteresting, with cheap-looking special effects work that achieves neither the texture of analogue reality nor a totally radical, digital reinvention of existence.
Somewhere in between ends up Hoai-Tran Bui from Inverse, who introduces the film “beautiful disaster” calls. She writes relatively diplomatically:
A bunch of ideas thrown together in a garish, startling, shiny, somehow hideous rejection of cinematic form. It should never have been done. And yet, now that it exists, we should all be grateful for it.
The Metacritic Metascore is currently 65 (leaning towards the positive), the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer is exactly 50 percent. It is currently not clear when the audience will be allowed to form their own opinion and when Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis will be shown in German cinemas.