Tyler Malone at LitHub on Megalopolis as camp:

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“One is drawn to camp,” according to Susan Sontag, “when one realizes that ‘sincerity’ is not enough.” The film’s hodgepodge of cliches dramatizes the hollow scenes of the Holocene. I doubt Coppola truly believes that some Randian architect can suddenly save us with a magic material—even if that magic material is “art”—but he is rightly horrified, as we all should be, that the decadence and degradation that currently surrounds us might be the best civilization has to offer.

Just as Starship Troopers works as both an action film and a satire of an action film, just as it uses propagandistic tools to its benefit even as it makes a mockery of propaganda, Megalopolis also is the thing it pokes fun at. It’s not that anyone is wrong to see some earnestness in the ending; it’s that there’s so much more to see. The ending is making fun of the idea that a bold dreamer and his muse could somehow save the world, but it also does believe that art and dialogue are the best way forward. Not as an answer, per se, but as a question.

I think I lean—by personal instinct and inclination as much as by informed analysis—more toward the sincere interpretation that Malone considers here. But in its ambiguity—in its willingness to engage in the cognitive dissonance required to see a complex and long-gestated work of art as maybe, just maybe, doing more than one thing at a time, and to see that those things might be in contradictory tension—this reads to me like one of the few reviews written by someone who actually saw the same movie as me.