Whereas a current opinion piece by Sam Wasson within the Instances suggests Coppola has already begun imagining one other movie he’d wish to make, this one being a musical, the reality is the filmmaker is 85 years previous. And he spent 40 years occupied with Megalopolis earlier than he lastly made it. There stays a good likelihood that Megalopolis will probably be his remaining movie. He actually tackled the film with the verve and ambition of an artist who was out to make a grand, and doubtlessly lasting, assertion concerning the which means of creation and existence.
Admittedly, Coppola and Lionsgate bought some pretty terrible publicity final month after the studio ran a trailer with AI-generated quotes from deceased critics supposedly maligning the director’s hottest works, together with The Godfather or Apocalypse Now. These quotes have been pretend and revealed a startling lack of due diligence or competency someplace within the advertising division. However as embarrassing (and thin-skinned) as that miscue was, it’s not onerous to think about that Coppola is a filmmaker who’s felt just like the knives have been out for him from almost the start. Ever since he gained his first Oscar for co-writing Patton at age 30, and his first Finest Image award for guiding The Godfather whereas solely 32, his reputation was rapidly matched by the anticipatory schadenfreude desirous to see his rising hubris stumble and fall.
Apocalypse Now was mockingly referred to as “Coppola’s Folly” within the press, with many desirous to see the film he spent two years making within the jungle blow up in a puff of smoke forward of its Cannes premiere in 1979. As an alternative it gained the Palme d’Or. Not even 15 years later, Coppola “slumming” in one thing as lurid and threadbare as “one other” Dracula film produced a equally gleeful pressure of negativity within the press forward of launch. That movie additionally turned out to be way more surrealist and unusual than was typical for a Hollywood horror, and a few cynics japed it will be Coppola’s “Bonfires of the Vampires.” (This was in reference to the then current and spectacular failure of Brian De Palma’s Bonfire of the Vanities adaptation.)
Each of these films in fact proved to be field workplace hits and are thought-about classics right now, with Apocalypse Now moreover being typically acknowledged as one of many best movies ever made. But right here we’re, after a long time of gossiping, with the crimson meat lastly on faucet in 2024. The most recent (and remaining?) Coppola epic is a monetary quagmire and a essential failure. One needn’t flip to AI to generate the adverse pull-quotes from this factor—personally I discovered Megalopolis to be an unfinished, if periodically fascinating, mess. It’s a failure of attain exceeding grasp.
But that is only one opinion, shaped by participating with a refreshingly unique piece of artwork. And the factor about Megalopolis is that Coppola didn’t make it to show a revenue in September 2024. He made it as a grand assertion on artwork, and maybe life, in trendy America. And by advantage of being a closing assertion kind one of many nice authors in his medium, Megalopolis will all the time have worth to be watched, mentioned, debated… and possibly ultimately reappraised.
It’s not even the primary time the filmmaker ran right into a public failure. Forty-two years in the past, Coppola launched the just about painfully well-titled One from the Coronary heart. The movie was meant to be the primary in a brand new wave of American cinema produced by Coppola’s American Zoetrope, a manufacturing firm that the filmmaker had finally was a bonafide studio. In idea, it will have been an unbiased distributor who might compete with the normal Hollywood majors, however this one would let filmmakers create something they need with minimal interference.
