You remember Branded?
Probably not. It felt like more of a hallucination than a movie. It was a 2012 release featuring Max Von Sydow, and played like a Eurojank fusion of Paprika and They Live. Perfectly mental. It was a tentpole event for connoisseurs of misguided magical misfires, a raving screed of Russian eccentrism strewn across the big screen to provoke stupefied glee and bewilderment. Branded was not good, or coherent, or functional in any capacity.
But it was inspired. Truly, verily, deeply inspired.
By what, who can even fucking say? Not the generic themes, setting, ideas, or tired politics in play. But some kind of undeniable energy possessed a couple of would-be Strugatsky brothers to tell America what they thought of it, and produced a most baffling royal delight to reign unchallenged until A Winter’s Tale dropped two years later.
Since then, it’s been an era of mediocrity. A long age of mainstream tentpole movies whose silliness barely manages to provoke an eyeroll. How can anyone possibly manage to critique an SFF movie in the time of Super Heroes? Wakanda is the most dizzying advanced technological utopia in the multiverse, but its entire national might can’t manage to guard a waterway more effectively than three Coast Guard cutters and a single drone. They stick thirty people on a barge and push it out to sea when roused to nautical war. When defending their sovereign territory against a land invasion, they all just kind of stand around outside and hope for the best. What’s the point of mocking it? That’s not a story, that’s a quick excuse for a fireworks display. There’s no intent, drive or dreaming. Alternatively mocking and appreciating bad cinema requires an earnest target. That’s something which seems sorely missed in the big budget filmmaking world currently.
So naturally, all us crap cinema afficionados got very excited when we saw the trailer for Megalopolis. It looked inspired. It looked earnest. And it looked absolutely awful, the kind of hideously bloody trainwreck that can only go off the rails when unbelievably talented artists are involved. Megalopolis looked like a reason to go to the movie theatre drunk in a suit. Something as wretched as Cats and as lofty as Heaven’s Gate. Our first perfectly– and I do mean perfectly– bad English-language film of the twenty first century.
It’s not.
I’m sorry to report that it’s just the new Showgirls. A boring soap opera elevated by goofy moments, whose delusions of granduer are destined to be defended as masterful by very boring people who think of themselves as cinephiles. It’s not inspired at all. If you’re reading this, you probably won’t be convinced, but at least you’ve gotten your fair warning. “Francis Ford Coppola’s ludicrous SFF vanity project” sounds so appealing on paper, I know. Then you watch it and realize that it’s the film equivalent of a NaNoWriMo novel. Coppola wanted to make a Big Important Thing but didn’t have any ideas. You, a discerning viewer of taste, want something like Branded, are willing to downgrade to Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets, would settle for Jupiter Ascending, or even just another measly John Carter or Avatar 2, but get Megalopolis instead.
When the late great Tobe Hooper’s career melted, he eventually admitted that he no longer cared whether his films were bad, or even worth watching at all. He just wanted to make movies and considered the results of that process to be irrelevant at best. He retained some visual inventiveness but had no spirit left. His last directorial efforts were just an old man taking a walk. That’s the same energy that Francis Ford Coppola brings here. For all the bombast and posturing, it’s just an old man fucking around on the Bocce Ball court. Leave him to his fun and go do something more important with your day.
Outer Freakwave 