Megalopolis (1/5 Stars)

“By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash - as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot - it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.”

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

The hook for seeing Megalopolis was too good for this reviewer to ignore, regardless of all the bad reviews and box office failure. I recall first hearing about this movie a few years ago. Francis Ford Coppola, maker of several of the best films ever (The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now) had an idea for an epic movie. Something he had wanted to make for decades. He believed in it so much that he swore that he spend his family fortune on it if no studio would fund it. No studio funded it, and so I am told, Mr. Coppola funded it himself. At 85 and a self-made man, he is entitled to one last big roll of the dice. And….it looks like he just lost something like 100 million dollars of his own money.

The interesting thing is that this isn’t the first time that Coppola has blown his fortune on a movie. After the great success of The Godfather Part I and Part II and Apocalypse Now, Coppola self-funded the costly flop One From the Heart which put him in the middle class (until Godfather Part III in 1990). That movie is underrated. It had pretty innovative visuals and a Tom Waits soundtrack, but unfortunately paired it with a not-sexy plot of the tired love of a long married couple. In other words, the story was never going to make money regardless of how cool everything else was. But everything else is cool and the movie is worth the viewing for any Coppola fan seeking a deep cut after consuming the hits. Megalopolis on the other hand, well, I don’t know what this movie is supposed to be. It looks expensive and has several fine actors, but whatever original inspiration and/or message Coppola thought he was conveying has been hopefully lost amidst a plethora of mixed metaphors and stale images.

I quote the above passage of George Orwell as an aide in trying to articulate what is going wrong here. Take the main metaphor of Megalopolis. The city in which the characters inhabit looks like New York City but is called New Rome. The main characters are Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and an upstart city planner named Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver). Other characters include a wealthy magnate named Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight) and a influential reporter Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza). The plot concerns the debaucherous decay of this empire of New Rome. At one point, the public is bribed with Bread and Circuses (this is a literal subtitle).

Any student of history can point to a glaring problem here. The characters Cesar, Cicero, and Crassus are from the fall of the Roman Republic (130 BC to 0 AD). The Roman Empire with its “bread and circuses” would fall hundreds of years later (200 AD to 476 AD). These are different things. For instance, the historical figure Julius Caesar was killed by a group of senators who considered him a tyrant and an enemy of the Republic. Wouldn’t then, the character whose namesake he shares be more appropriately an enemy of an institution that is a republic, not an empire? And Caesar was a popular leader not an elitist. Wouldn’t then his nemesis be one of the elites, not a vulgar rabble-rouser named Clodio Pulcher (Shia LeBouf) whose followers conspicuously bear red base-ball caps. Does Coppola not expect us to notice that he is misusing his metaphors? Does Coppola, this man who spent 100 million dollars of his own money on this idea, not understand the historical difference between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire?

There is another reference here that seems heavily relied upon if not explicitly stated. The movie has heavy tones of Ayn Rand and objectivism. I don’t think it is a mistake that the main character is an architect (like the main character in The Fountainhead) and he is developing this new fantastic and futuristic building material (like the main character in Atlas Shrugged) that will solve all sorts of humanity’s problem if not for the silly little people who don’t understand genius when they see it. This architect is a very special person. Apparently he can stop time. Like, a building is falling down. He stops time, and while the building is stuck in free-fall and the world and everyone in it is frozen, he sort of nonchalantly looks around before resuming time again. It’s a cool trick, never explained and never used in such a way that would develop plot or character. There is no connection whatsoever between this objectivist architect, Megalon, or the time-stopping power with the historical Rome, either its republic or its empire. The little sense that the metaphors make on their own is doubly lost in their combination.

The material is called Megalon and the silly little people are afraid of it, though no reasons are given as to why. The architect is using this material to build a new city amongst the skyscrapers of Manhattan. This new city, in the humble opinion of this reviewer, is a god awful monstrosity that no one in their right mind would ever want to live in. Its best quality seems to be how it looks from a very very long distance. Imagine for a moment actually living in this place with a million other people. There are no discernable units, no bedrooms, no kitchens, and no bathrooms. Call me old-fashioned and reactionary but I think it highly important to be able to take a shit in private.

The movie provides a much better use for Megalon than as a building material. In one scene, a character gets shot, point blank, in the face. In the hospital, Megalon is used as a substitute for that part of his brain that exploded out of the back of his skull. This character makes a full recovery. The only thing more amazing than that turn of events is the fact that no-one else really appreciates its significance. Megalon apparently gives the gift of immortality and nobody cares.

This story ends with a big speech by our hero architect in which he exhorts the people of New Rome to, I don’t know, I couldn’t figure out what on earth he was talking about. I looked online for the transcript of that speech so that I could reprint it here and analyze it as a prime example of the type of meaningless bullshit that pervades this movie. But I couldn’t find it at this time. I expect it will someday be easier to look up later and I’ll update this blog post when it is possible to do so.

Civil War (2/5 Stars)

The first election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a shock to the system of the liberal media establishment. I know, I know, that phrase “liberal media establishment” is hopelessly broad for this one person’s understanding. Yet, I believe I can adequately comment on my general knowledge of movies and my more limited knowledge of the television landscape. We colloquially refer to this particular part of the entertainment industry within the deceptively simplistic word of Hollywood, which, even though it is composed of many different private organizations, is nonetheless deserving of the stereotype of being decidedly left of center in its politics. We are comfortable making this observation not only based on political registration (the Republican in the Academy is a rare find) but upon practical realities: the geographic base of the movie/television industry is located in Los Angeles and New York City, two firmly left of center places. Since liberals vastly outnumber conservatives in these places, you can safely make the assumption that liberals vastly outnumber conservatives in the industry. Even Fox News, that lone voice of conservatism on the cable airwaves, has its studios located in Manhattan.

When an election result disturbs one’s sense of reality, it presents an opportunity to step out of one’s bubble and adapt. On the other hand, you could abandon yourself in the idea that the world is a chaotic mystery as presented here in Alex Garland’s Civil War, a movie about an American civil war with no deeper understanding of why such events might take place. The movie starts with the civil war already commenced. We are provided no reasons as to why it is here. We are told that one side of the civil war has the President in Washington D.C. and the other side is being led by the Western Forces of California and Texas. The combination of those two states should tell you right there the level of seriousness this movie pretends too. Given the movie’s plot and characters, it may as well be set on Mars.

Civil War isn’t the first political movie that aims to avoid politics and think itself clever for doing so. Watching this movie, I was reminded of the political comedies of Armando Ianucci, specifically The Thick of It, his send up of British politics, and Veep, his send up of American politics. The Thick of It concerned the operation of a fictional department within the British Parliament. The characters run amok doing various meaningless things that are mainly aimed at influencing their image in the press. In Veep, the vice president Selina Meyer is a politician of no particular political party and her team runs amok doing various meaningless things that are mainly aimed at influencing their image in the press. Neither group of characters had any real power. For comedy, this worked because if you omitted the outcomes of a political story, that is the laws that are created and their implementation on the populace, then what politicians do all day really is absurd.

But, again, The Thick of It and Veep are comedies. Civil War is supposed to be a drama. It is absurd, but has no jokes. The movie follows some journalists (played by Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura) as they travel from New York City to Washington D.C. with the aim of finding the President and interviewing him. The ease or difficulty of such a mission is arbitrary and rises and deflates with every other scene. The movie, although avoiding politics, nevertheless lets on clues as to its sympathies. One of the main locations is Charlottesville, the site of a 2017 white nationalist march that descended into violence. The casting of the President is Nick Offerman, best known as the conservative parks commissioner Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation. So without going anywhere near what can be described as details or reasons, we can be fairly confident who Alex Garland blames: the conservatives. Is this what Hollywood has to offer to the political discourse? A vague threat that if we aren't careful enough about who we vote (i.e. read Trump) the country might descend into a civil war?

The violence has no connection with modern warfare. The fights between soldiers occur at blindingly stupid close range. The tactics and ammunition seem to be chosen primarily for their cinematic advantages. There are no drones although I would think any serious war movie about now or the near future would understand their importance. Our heroes, one of which is a 12-year-old girl, photograph the scenes (again at blindingly stupid close range) and pretend that they are capturing drama.

There are scenes that destroy American monuments, the most prominent being a bombing of the Lincoln Memorial. If Alex Garland were American, I would accuse him of being unpatriotic. After all, how would this Englishman feel if a pretentious American movie destroyed Westminster Abbey for no particular reason (who knows, maybe he was inspired by V for Vendetta). His career appears to be in a downward spiral reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan. He had an excellent first feature (Ex Machina), followed that up with a good movie (Annihilation) before going on to make a movie that was bad (Men) and now another one that is even worse (Civil War). Like Mr. Shyamalan, this sort of thing happens when a talented but self-important filmmaker ignores all the outside voices telling him his work is going to shit. I would not be surprised if this is not bottom.