On Megalopolis

Man-Nahata, The Fountainhead & Engineered Living Materials

When I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis shortly after it came out, I had to let it ferment for a while before I could decide what I’d just watched. It’s a lot, maybe too much of too many things at once. The sepia-gold aesthetic isn’t my style, the language and tone irritated me, and I could easily list a long set of complaints. But you can find those everywhere. By now the internet has largely settled on a verdict: a film accused of reaching for too much and landing on too little. Critical reception has been sharply divided, and audience scores are low (4.7/10 on IMDb, 34% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Popcornmeter, and 2.3 stars on Letterboxd). Still, I think that harshness has had a bit of a snowball effect. The story of a legendary director pouring personal money into a passion project that “failed” is simply too juicy not to become part of the trolling. And while Megalopolis is definitely not going to become my favorite film, a few things in it stayed with me, so persistently that I find myself writing my first essay on it.