Megalopolis

Megalopolis happens when an octogenarian whose social life peaked in the 60s drops shrooms for the 1st time in decades
18/100103939
Starring
Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel
Director
Francis Ford Coppola
Rating
R
Genre
Drama, Sci-Fi, Tragedy
Release date
Sept 27, 2024
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Story/Plot
Visuals/Cinematography
Performance
Direction
Non-Wokeness
Rating Summary
Twenty pounds of meaningless metaphors in a ten pound bag, Megalopolis is a 2+ hour kaleidoscope of pompous, self-indulgent nonsense.
Audience Woke Score (Vote)
11 people reacted to this.
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Megalopolis, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, follows the ambitious architect Cesar Catilina, played by Adam Driver, as he attempts to rebuild the city of New Rome into a utopia after a devastating disaster. His vision clashes with the corrupt Mayor Franklyn Cicero, portrayed by Giancarlo Esposito, leading to intense political and personal turmoil.

Megalopolis

Leveling a shotgun of neverending metaphor-buckshot as subtle as a colonoscopy directly at your face, Megalopolis is an unmitigated failure of a film in every respect. It wastes the talent of its performers who attempt to smile through the word vomit of high-minded vapidity. Its story is a nightmarescape of a reimagined “Julius Ceasar,” butchered by the overindulged arrogance of a director who has allowed his disenfranchisement over the assembly line manufactured and focus group-approved modern cinema to overwhelm the instincts that made him one of the greatest American filmmakers in history. The result is a loud and frenetic mess of meaninglessness.

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Apparently filmed atop a water bed, so take your Dramamine, Megalopolis’s cinematography is what one might expect from a first-year community college film student who just saw Citizen Kane for the first time and was mesmerized by its groundbreaking use of camera angles. A Geometry class in the Netherlands doesn’t have this many Dutch angles.

Megalopolis is the worst kind of art. It’s the type that is so incredibly dumb yet couched in empty-calorie rhetorical nonsense so bereft of meaning that one wonders if Kamala Harris had a hand in writing it. It is the cinematic equivalent of pissing on a wall avant-garde post-modern garbage that professional critics and other artistes laude because they don’t get it, assume that the problem lies with them, but don’t want to look stupid. Megalopolis reveals no deep truths about the human condition, nor does it capture the imagination or hearts of the audience.

The studio in which Megalopolis was filmed should be razed, its ashes scattered, and the ground salted. If this shows us anything, Francis Ford Coppola should never work without a net again. He apparently needs someone looking over his shoulder, challenging some of his worst instincts.

 

WOKE ELEMENTS

Fart Some Art
  • Honestly, the film is so far up its own rectum that clear and concise wokeness would have been preferable. However, the overarching conceit of the movie is that art is the true savior of humanity and that with each act of creation, we become closer to being God.

    megalopolis's closing title card is made to appear as though it's words carved into stone. It reads "I pledge allegiance to our human family, and to all the species that we protect. one earth, indivisible, with long life, education and justice for all
    Megalopolis’s closing title card
Plot Shots
  • One of the film’s main villains’s last words are “Don’t tread on me.” This is, of course, a well-known conservative phrase borrowed from the Gadsen flag. However, earlier in the film, the same character yells out Sic Semper Tyrannis, which is attributed to Brutus as he killed Ceasar, and is what John Wilks Booth said after shooting President Lincoln. So, who knows? Megalopolis is lousy with heavy-handed and bumbling metaphors.
Shia LaBouvier
  • Shia LaBeouf cross-dresses for a time, but the film doesn’t appear to be celebrating transexuals. Rather, it’s an expression of depravity and decadence.

James Carrick

James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.

10 comments

  • relict

    September 29, 2024 at 7:02 pm

    Francis Ford Coppola rewrites history, using Julius Caesar’s rise to power as a template and the 1920’s as a backdrop. His motivation becomes clear around the middle of the movie, where Cesar, in the middle of a drug binge, whispers to the audience in voice-over “What if we create the gods?” over and over, hypnotically. The film does an excellent job of capturing the decadence of Rome, but goes out of its way to imply the original Caesar was a hero, for nothing more than craving power and having a vision. The film ends with a rewritten pledge of allegiance that very deliberately removes God, and the implication that Americans will have to surrender values like Love and Liberty in order to step into the planned Utopia.

    This is not subtle. It’s not found tucked away deep in metaphor. The film just outright tells us this.

    3
    0

    Reply

  • Johnmiller1985

    October 4, 2024 at 12:48 pm

    Well, based on the review, it’s not actually woke. Bad for sure but almost not woke at all.

    8
    4

    Reply

  • colorofmoney

    October 18, 2024 at 10:14 am

    I think this film has a lot to say about the woke state of America. Coppola’s ideas are Randian in their scope, showing how we need the right kinds of great thinkers to rise up just like Ancient Rome so we can avoid their fate. Very good for an art film.

    Reply

  • Ktuff_morning

    October 19, 2024 at 2:20 pm

    Your ugly hyperbole reveals your “conservative” character (or lack thereof); fMRIs of Republican brains show higher activation in the areas associated with fear and disgust. Your reviews scream I am afraid and I am in disgust. Frankly, the evocative imagery of your metaphors isn’t cutting it anymore. I’m just getting tired of the hate. Aren’t you? Whenever I load up your website that hate-face is always the first thing that catches my eye and your reviews have the exact same energy. You’re turning everyone off. Either consciously or unconsciously.

    Reply

  • SHeikVoigt

    October 19, 2024 at 3:50 pm

    Um, no. I literally rely on this guy because I find his reviews so helpful.
    I come here and check the “woke elements” of any movie before I go see it now, my husband will even ask if I checked it yet before we plan a movie date.
    We want to go into movies as blind as possible before seeing them to avoid spoilers, but there’s nothing worse than getting blind-sided by some liberal trash when you’re trying to enjoy a movie or show. It makes me not want to watch or read anything made after a certain year anymore because it’s just so annoying.

    If this isn’t your cup of tea, why don’t you shuffle on instead of trying to ruin it for the rest of us?

    Reply

  • Sweet Deals

    October 19, 2024 at 8:19 pm

    Ktuff_morning is one of our resident trolls. He has very low self-esteem and he posts repetitive attacks against the reviewer (and everyone who isn’t like him) because it makes him feel special and important. Otherwise, if he genuinely didn’t enjoy reading James Carrick’s opinions, he wouldn’t keep coming back for more.

    On a side note, when I first read about “dramamine”, I thought it was a made-up word for a medication that would help a viewer survive a bad movie with his or her sanity intact. I didn’t realize until after I looked it up that it was the name of a real motion sickness medication. (I wish there was a medication that could help restore my sanity after exposing myself to a movie that made me feel sick).

    Reply

  • Ktuff_morning

    October 22, 2024 at 12:21 am

    This review doesn’t say anything about woke elements at all. It’s just ugly, childish character assassination. Wake up and smell the David Duke lady.

    Now me running this website. There’s an idea. I’d do it so much better and it would be vastly more successful. Imagine the owner of WIOW being a liberal and throwing the slap-down on Hollywoke. My reviews would be funny and I’d have the next Golden Raspberry with all the clicks. My website would be a honeytrap for conservatives who I will skewer with my superior intellect and rapist-like wit. Plus, I’d be effective in evincing real change. My merch would not have any of that Trump crap I’ll tell you that.

    Mmmm, nah. Not wasting my life on this. I like to hang around because I genuinely skeeve woke and this forum is quite tolerant for my contrary brilliance .

    Reply

  • Illgble

    December 29, 2024 at 12:39 pm

    I don’t want to weigh in on whether Megalopolis is a good film. It’s definitely an eccentric career capper of sorts from Coppola, but that doesn’t make it good any more than Eyes Wide Shut was. And while I love what James Carrick is doing with this site, I think his idea of woke significantly differs from my own. James sets up “based” as the opposite of “woke” on his scale, which I don’t find unreasonable, but I also don’t find particularly useful. I’d prefer “non-woke” to be the opposite of “woke”. And by that I mean the work neither shows signs of promoting woke propaganda nor being a reaction to it. That’s pretty much how all films were prior to 2016, and that’s what I’d like to get back to. If they’re also based, that’s great, but it’s not something I need. I just want woke to evaporate and have no influence on art or entertainment whatsoever.

    In that spirit, I found this film to be pretty non-woke. I mean, Coppola cast Jon Voight in a major role, and he’s an avowed Trump supporter. I guess you could claim that makes it a reaction like Terror on the Prairie, and I wouldn’t argue against that, but I think it’s more in the spirit of just trying to get to a point where someone’s politics don’t matter when it comes to selecting cast and crew. There are also a couple other people in cast, Shia LaBeouf and Dustin Hoffman, who got canceled in the whole woke MeToo pogrom. I think they were included in the same spirit.

    So yeah, like it or not, I don’t think it’s woke.

    Reply

    • James Carrick

      December 29, 2024 at 1:04 pm

      We used to use the word “non-woke” but received countless complaints of it being confusing. So we now use the word “base” as a synonym for non-woke.

      Our glossary can be found here. https://worthitorwoke.com/about-us/

      Reply

  • The sane Canuck

    January 14, 2025 at 2:59 am

    Have to agree with others, it might be bad and too artsy for it’s own good but there’s hardly that much woke stuff in it

    Reply

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