In defence of glorious failures

Coppola’s Megalopolis is a disaster, but at least it’s his disaster.

It’s rare to see a truly awful film these days

Take some of the biggest box office flops from the last couple of years. Furiosa, Madame Webb, Borderlands, Joker: Folie à Deux. These movies aren’t inherently badly made, per say. They’re not incomprehensible, unforgivably boring, or shockingly acted. They’re mostly just tired mush. The last, sour drops squeezed from an exhausted franchise.

Looking at that list, you might think it’s a sign that Hollywood should take all their broken-down franchises out back, and put them out of their misery. Send them all to the big film lot in the sky, and start again with a fresh slate.

But that would be fiscal madness.

Dusting off a film’s desiccated corpse, slapping a new wig on it, and sending it out to bored audiences might make for flops, but it's also a recipe for winners, too.

Just look at the top-grossing films of last year: Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Moana 2, Despicable Me 4, and Wicked.

Why these stale movies fared better is a mystery to me. I’m sure it’s a mystery to many film executives, too. Who knows why audiences happily gobble up the same shit for years and then, seemingly with no warning, turn their nose up to it. But I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Someone will come along, season the trough with pepper, and the masses will be appeased again.

Which is why it was surprisingly refreshing to see a big-budget movie that was properly and creatively bad. Not just junk-food bad, but like a degustation-restaurant-where-every-dish-is-served-in-a-shoe bad. The kind of bad that lingers, The kind of bad where a scene will pop into your head unbidden while you’re doing the dishes.

I’m talking about Francis Ford Coppola’s 2024 film, Megalopolis.

Coppola is, of course, filmmaking royalty. He’s the director behind Apocalypse Now and the Godfather movies.

But for every outstanding project Coppola has put his name to, there are several certified eggs to counterbalance the genius. As a director, he is compellingly inconsistent. But even in Coppola’s famously patchy catalogue, Megalopolis is particularly bad. It’s a turgid slog from start to finish.

I would give you a quick summary of the film, but the plot is slippery and confusing, like a turd in the shape of a möbius strip. Do I write about the main character, Caesar, and his ability to stop time – a superpower which is never explained and then ignored in the second half of the film?

Or perhaps I should write about Caesar's goal to build a revolutionary new city – which transpires to be less of a city, more of a big park filled with lots of travelators.

It also seems remiss to ignore the star-studded cast who float untethered through scenes, clearly baffled by their character’s motivations. No one seems to know what they’re doing or why they’re there.

In fact, what are any of us doing? This movie is so bad, it pulls us into larger existential questioning.

But, more than any other project in his professional life, Megalopolis was the film Coppola wanted to make. It was a script he’d been tinkering with for decades. No studio wanted to finance it, so Coppola sold a vineyard or two and funded the whole thing himself.

And for all his hard work, and vision, and determination — this movie sucked.

It sucked like a black hole made love to a galaxy-sized dyson. Truly, a cosmic-level of suckiness.

But though it was so bad, it threatened to rip a hole in the fabric of reality, I’m so glad it was made.

Most good creative endeavours come with risk. But Hollywood, with all of its formulas, templates, market research, and audience testing doesn’t want risk, no matter how great the reward. The target is firmly set at ‘commercially viable mush’. It’s a sad, middling spectrum that exists between ‘not great’ and ‘okay I guess’.

So for all that we’ve lost ‘terrible’ in cinema (and in much of the arts actually), it’s come at the cost of ‘sublime’.

But no one has offered a better defence of Megalopolis than Coppola himself. On receiving several nominations for The Razzies – the Oscars for shit films – Coppola took to Instagram in the last few days and wrote:

I am thrilled to accept the Razzie award in so many important categories for Megalopolis, and for the distinctive honor of being nominated as the worst director, worst screenplay, and worst picture at a time when so few have the courage to go against the prevailing trends of contemporary moviemaking!

In this wreck of a world today, where ART is given scores as if it were professional wrestling, I chose to NOT follow the gutless rules laid down by an industry so terrified of risk that despite the enormous pool of young talent at its disposal, may not create pictures that will be relevant and alive 50 years from now.

What an honor to stand alongside a great and courageous filmmaker like Jacques Tati who impoverished himself completely to make one of cinema’s most beloved failures, PLAYTIME! My sincere thanks to all my brilliant colleagues who joined me to make our work of art, MEGALOPOLIS, and let us remind ourselves us that box-office is only about money, and like war, stupidity and politics has no true place in our future.

Hear, hear.

So if you’re going out to make art this week — in any form — make it great or make it terrible. Just don’t be okay.

Only in mediocrity to we truly languish.