Please take a few minutes to read the review of Megalopolis by Nick Mamatas.
It starts with the line “I object to every moment of this film.” and only gets better from there.
The trailer is astounding in ways both good and bad.
What I’ve found is that when media bridges that gap–between astounding good and astounding bad–usually it nets out as awful. Why? Because coherence matters. It matters that a thing that I’m expected to look at for 90 minutes or 120 minutes makes sense.
Pure visual imagery is of course great. I may be misremembering but I think I read something about James Cameron in his early career always having MTV on in the background when he was editing to have some visual stimulation. But never the sound. Maybe Megalopolis would be better like that, as a series of visuals.
But 138 minutes of interesting visuals is not the thing being sold, it’s a motion picture.
On that basis I probably will skip it.
And I’ll reread Nick’s review when I have the chance to watch it at home, and then I’ll decide whether it’s worth it to try to watch that mess.
Also, I think often about works of art that are considered grand failures by artists who are otherwise known as masters. This movie seems as though in 5 or 10 years it will be universally regarded that way.
The process by which grand failures are produced by grand artists is always interesting to explore. At least for me it is.
