Warren Ellis on Megalopolis –

My first thought on leaving the cinema was: this was the cinema that made Coppola. The bones of the film come from the 1930s-1950s, to my untrained eye. But there are parts of Sixties filmmaking in there, Fellini, flashes of Seventies experimental filmmaking, some Eighties excess and a touch of No Wave, Nineties sleaze and 2000s lighting. I saw a few moments of underwater Guy Maddin, some Saul Bass, bursts of early Hollywood, a screwball comedy meet-cute, flashes of various experimental directors. Theatre. Shakespeare. Performance styles from various different eras rubbing up against each other. Dustin Hoffman doing a noir heavy next to Shia LaBeouf doing his neo-Nicolas Cage shamanic thing as Clodius. There’s newspapers and old-timey press packs with old cameras, and Nathalie Emmanuel whispering into a digital recording ring.

It’s most of a century of film mixed together and named a fable.

That does not sound like a film I want to see. It sounds like a complete and utter mess. I love the idea of combining various filmmaking techniques into a new and glorious thing, but this description is bonkers.

It is full of ideas. Over-full, sure, but who cares. The politics are sloppy, the symbolism is all over the place, the actors are performing in five different movies, everything stops dead early on while Adam Driver does five minutes of Hamlet, and who cares. It reaches for something. Something monumental. Its abiding message is not in the film, it’s about the film: it says “this is what I have learned about my artform, this is its history and this is where it could go. This is all I know and all I dream.”

I want to watch it two or three more times, at least. I will have to wait for a Blu-Ray.

I’m not going to tell you it’s a great film. On some simple shallow levels it may not even be a good film. But it’s all I’ve been able to think about all week and I want to watch it many more times. That, for me, makes it a compelling and valuable and, yes, entertaining film.

If you don’t like your art awash with human ambition and a deep pool of excessive madness, then there’ll be a new Captain America film along soon. MEGALOPOLIS, flawed though it may be, is the shit I live for.

I’m not super interested in that Captain America film either…