Warren Ellis on Coppola’s Megalopolis:

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’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 saw Megalopolis the week before last and wanted to write about it, but—rather pathetically, perhaps—flinched off doing so, due to being crushingly aware of my cinematic illiteracy, and aware also that to say I actually really liked it would be to fly in the face of People Who Supposedly Know Their Shit.

Which is doubly ironic, really, because—having read a good handful of the mostly dismissive reviews ahead of seeing it—I found myself thinking all the way through that the thing Coppola had in his sights all the way through was exactly the sneering contempt for ambition and utopianism that comes out in those reviews. Sure, it’s a jumbled mess at times—but it’s a jumbled mess that dares to dream, and tells us that we too should dare to dream better and bigger than this paradoxical mix of managed decline and Number Go Up that we’re constantly told is the best we can get.

Like I say, I’m in no position to judge it as a work of cinematic technique, though I feel safe in saying it’ll date pretty fast, despite that drawing on a century of cinematic aesthetics that Warren mentions. But as a document of the moment, culturally speaking? Total landmark. We’ll think of it as such in another two decades or so; whether we see it as a turning point, or as a sign for the road left untravelled, is exactly the open question that Megalopolis is trying to confront us with.

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Relatedly, I should have the courage of my own aesthetic convictions. Not like anyone reads this shit, is it?