David Walsh Reviews Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis: Some Reflections

In recent years film and culture critic David Walsh and his colleagues have attended to fewer and fewer major Hollywood releases, frequently going for months without reviewing a single such movie--while their publishing a review of a big "blockbuster" has become especially rare. This year has been no exception. There was a more than five month gap between their review of Alex Garland's Civil War back in April, and their belated publication of their only review of a major Hollywood film of the summer, Lee Isaac Chung's Twisters, at the start of October.

This may seem just as well given that there has been a very great deal else for them to write about in this era of "polycrisis," during which the arts have reflected the troubles in the larger world--with the institutions of the art world facing existential crisis (prominent museums, symphonies, schools withering and dying for lack of funding, and even megabuck film studios floundering) amid post-pandemic economic stress, government austerity, culture war; with artists and members of associated occupational groups finding it ever harder to make a living and being driven to strike action the same way so many other workers are (most recently, in the video game industry); with the horrific events of our times driving artists to take public stands, and those conventional wisdom flatters by calling "leaders" once more showing their colossal hypocrisy in the battles over free speech that rage in their wake; among much, much else. Indeed, if their review page covered previous Mad Max and Planet of the Apes and Deadpool films, their sequels could hardly seem worth the trouble amid all that, making their taking a pass on writing about them quite natural--the more in as from a critical standpoint such as their own there is often not very much to say about them. Indeed, it seems telling of their feeling about the poverty of American filmmaking today that Walsh and his colleagues recently had time for a series of articles to the movies of 1974.

Still, North American audiences do every now and then get a really big-budget, highly-publicized wide release made by people who are at least aspiring to present them with something more than another Big Dumb Blockbuster, at the very least a Big But Not So Dumb Blockbuster (whether successfully or unsuccessfully). Dealing with these Walsh and company usually do rise to the occasion--with Josh Varlin's appraisal of both parts of Denis Villeneuve's Dune outstanding, and Jacob Crosse and Patrick Martin's coverage of Civil War one of the rather small portion of the outpouring of reviews of that film that seemed to me truly worthwhile.

Francis Ford Coppola's Neo-Roman science fiction epic Megalopolis is another such film, and after its release last month Walsh undertook its review. Alas, his assessment was not positive--but certainly more interesting than most of what I have seen of the outpouring of negative comment, not least for what the film seems to say about a whole epoch in the history of filmmaking.