Why is Megalopolis so divisive?

Thoughts on Coppola's passion project and why not everyone is quite as passionate

It’s been nearly two weeks since the international release of Megalopolis and we are still no closer to a conclusive review of Coppola’s latest.

Usually, we’ll have seen a raving CinemaScore, Rotten Tomatoes, a Letterboxd Top 250 achievement or an overwhelmingly large amount of TikToker endorsements of the film by now - if it was any good, that is. You only have to take a quick glance at the ironic horizon of skyscrapers the Letterboxd ratings have created to see that this was not a film for everyone.

Recent readers of The Amateur’s Take will know that I hate saying that.

Film is for everyone, no matter what it’s about - it’s a film’s job to be good.

But I really do mean it when I say that this was not for anyone other Coppola himself: he even rated it 5 stars on Letterboxd!

With a sizeable investment made involving a winery bought and sold, Coppola really put himself into this project. Of course, Coppola apologists everywhere have taken to praising the film’s obvious flaws and hailing them as true cinema (whatever that means) in the face of what I think are pretty fair criticisms. The story is very convoluted and not focused on a key motivation, the characters are difficult to empathise with and the acting feels disjointed from the script.

But why can’t we agree, like with most movies in the modern age, whether we generally like it or not? La La Land was generally loved, modern Marvel is generally hated and Uncut Gems, Mother! and Beau is Afraid are all now accompanied by Megalopolis as some of the most recent divisive films.

Appreciation for cinematic releases as hyped as Megalopolis usually come from a place crowded by the cinephilic obsession with filmmaking craftsmanship. Objectively, a lot of this film is quite poor CGI so the visuals aren’t up to scratch enough for that to be the leading reason for positive reviews. Occasionally, an iconic script will shine through all of a film’s flaws: but I’m afraid that only Adam Driver’s line delivery in a certain early scene will live on. Even the acting, as you’ll see in the aforelinked 90-second clip, is painfully stagnant.

It’s clear why people are hating it - what on earth are people loving about it?

My first thought is the cast: an incredibly star-studded, perhaps even over-saturated, line-up definitely excited people; myself included. When you hear that Grace Vanderwaal is back on screen but at the request of Francis Ford Coppola, your head naturally turns. If the stars of the show are the reason for a surprising amount of fours and fives out of fives from Rotten Tomatoes’ critics, then we find ourselves dragged into a rabbit-hole-esque debate of whether Coppola did a good job or whether we like seeing our favourite celebrities.

Taking a quick peek at some of the top reviews, we find no groundbreaking answers to our question and only the simplistic yet factual realisation that as much as originality is valued on the screen, no one is quite sure what originality is.

What I think is original might be overplayed to Kat Sachs from the Chicago Reader, and a film that I feel has a flimsy story might be structural gold to Eileen Jones at the Jacobin.

If there’s any inkling of a trend in the positive reviews of Megalopolis, it’s that a lot of them are American. Because of the Coppola effect paired with the plot’s obsessively metaphorical Imperial America, I can only assume that if anyone empathises with Coppola’s vision, they probably feel very strongly about the modern American landscape: both culturally and physically.

I suppose I do have to thank Coppola for proving to me how crucially interconnected empathy is with the cinematic experience. If audiences don’t care, audiences won’t get it and audiences just will not like it.

For the sake of an answer to today’s question, I think Megalopolis’s divisive nature stems from the same origins as Babylon’s reception did.

Audiences are inclined to resonate with stories that are universal, that pull them in right from the base of their heartstrings. Babylon was, in my opinion, a stunning film that consumed me with the desire to fulfil my creative ambitions but it drew great criticism for being unrealistic, difficult to relate to and messy. Maybe I only think it was a great film because I was thinking about my unrealised dreams of working in the arts; leaving me liable to Babylon’s seduction.

In the same vein, I was most definitely not thinking about the past grandeur of American soil or the supposed tainted of its history with modern-day debauchery; resulting in me being impenetrable to Coppola’s craft. I also have limited empathy for the genius-madman-addict trope, even if it’s Adam Driver playing the role. Both of these trivial preferences alone place me far away from the target audience for Megalopolis - but I don’t think Coppola cares.

He made his film whether you like it or not, and that’s all he wanted.

You can find my review of the film here.