In Review: 'Megalopolis,' 'The Wild Robot'

In the works since the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola's self-funded passion project arrives in theaters and Dreamworks' latest stars a robot trapped in a world for which she was never made.

Megalopolis
Dir. Francis Ford Coppola
138 min.

It’s tantalizing to think about what Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating dream project Megalopolis would have looked like at any point since he conceived the idea in 1977. The notion of a modern American city crumbling like the fall of Rome and reimagined as a forward-thinking utopia is both evergreen for Coppola and wholly dependent on the many different artistic phases he’s evolved through over the years. Could Megalopolis have brought the pop-surrealistic madness of Apocalypse Now into the urban context? Might it have had the pristine formal lushness of his ‘80s work, perhaps with the experimental bent of a film like Rumble Fish? Or is there some possibility that he could have reconciled his vision with more commercial demands, as he did in his later studio works? Whatever the case, Megalopolis was always destined to be of-the-now, a barometer of both where American culture and cinema were in the era of its making and where Coppola’s artistic impulse might lead him. 

All of which is to say that the Megalopolis of 2024 is firmly the Coppola of the 21st century, when he took a long and permanent break from Hollywood after 1997’s underrated legal drama The Rainmaker and returned with a trio of independent curios (2007’s Youth Without Youth, 2009’s Tetro, and 2011’s Twixt) that found him struggling, however nobly, to reinvent himself and move the medium forward. The awkward iconoclasm of Megalopolis, magnified by its ambition and $120 million of his own money, has resulted in such a singular fiasco that it’s quite possible to suspect that Coppola is once again ahead of his time and that history will give it the One From the Heart treatment, resuscitating a critical and (expected) commercial failure. Yet the film is so muddled and wrong-footed—and the digital look so far from the pristine majesty of One From the Heart or Bram Stoker’s Dracula, its closest stylistic antecedents—that it feels more like a master who has simply lost his touch. 

One of the major problems with Megalopolis is that Coppola cannot establish a basic narrative through-line to which he can attach his philosophical ideas and conceptual flights of fancy. Apocalypse Now had the girding of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, so whatever Captain Willard encountered on his journey downriver in South Vietnam, his mission to find and assassinate Colonel Kurtz remained clear from the start. But in the New Rome of Megalopolis, which resembles a screensaver New York City with old, crumbling Roman facades, an epic fight for the future doesn’t happen on clearly defined terms. All we know is that the city has to be rebuilt and two men have competing notions of how to do it: Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is a brilliant, mercurial architect who has the federal authority to marshal resources as he pleases, and he intends to use a material called Megalon that has magical properties, like control over time and space. Opposing him is Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), an unpopular mayor who nonetheless has the power to undermine Cesar and press for the older way of doing things. 

The cast of characters expands greatly from there and includes Cicero’s glamorous daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who gets involved romantically with Cesar; Cesar’s jealous, vindictive cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), who veers off on a sinister political path; Cesar’s outrageous uncle Crassus (Jon Voight), who seems to hold the pursestrings for the whole city; and TV personality Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), whose lust for wealth and fame has her chasing power like a key light. Laurence Fishburne, as Cesar’s driver, serves as the film’s narrator, alternately patching up holes up the story and reading aloud quotes that are already etched on tablets on screen. The film’s semi-satirical tone encourages most of these actors—Plaza most entertainingly, LaBeouf most desperately—to err on the side of cartoonish, leaving only Driver and Esposito to lock horns in a pitched Shakespearean showdown. 

Echoes of Coppola’s previous work abound, though never to Megalopolis’ favor: The way Cesar’s retro-futuristic idealism clashes with the corrupt old guard smacks of Tucker: The Man and His Dream, but Coppola relies on Cesar conjuring magic in order to create a utopia of moving walkways and inorganic public spaces. The eye-catching superimpositions and split-screens recall the in-camera effects of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but have a cheap, unappealing digital sheen that, paired with the performances, look too much like the Panem of The Hunger Games movies. The connection between political will and familial turmoil recall The Godfather trilogy, but the film lacks the patience and gravity to register as a tragedy, or even to make much dramatic hay. 

And yet, Coppola’s big swing for the fences still hits you with a bracing gust of wind as he whiffs. There are moments of inspired lunacy, like the city’s dysfunctional elites presiding over bread-and-circuses event that converts Madison Square Garden into the Colosseum or a romantic scene atop silver beams dangling over the city at sunset, that keep the film compelling, even if it never finds a consistent rhythm. The kitchen-sink maximalism of Megalopolis is a show of real artistic courage—love it or hate it, you will need to talk about it afterwards—and an ultimately touching affirmation of Cesar’s idealism, which is a natural stand-in for Coppola. For all the film’s despair about a broken America, it believes wholeheartedly in the human innovation and creative will necessary to find new footing in the future. Perhaps the last gift of a great cinematic dreamer is to make us believe that anything is possible. — Scott Tobias

Megalopolis opens in theaters everywhere tonight.

The Wild Robot
Dir. Chris Sanders
102 min.

A state-of-the-art robot programmed to perform a variety of tasks, ROZZUM unit 7134 (“Roz” for short, voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) has been designed to fit in almost anywhere except where she finds herself in the opening moments of The Wild Robot. Stranded by a shipwreck on an isolated island filled with wildlife, Roz opens her eyes to the sight of several sets of eyes staring back at her. Neither the machine nor the island’s creatures know what to make of each other. Roz needs tasks to complete to the satisfaction of those she serves. But the island seemingly has no tasks and the animals, who view her as a threat, don’t make a lot of sense to Roz. So Roz adapts. She sits and studies as the sun rises and sets until she’s figured out how to communicate with her new neighbors. But it’s once Roz thinks she’s deciphered the island that her new home, and her place within it, becomes truly puzzling.

Adapted from a series of children’s books written and illustrated by Peter Brown, The Wild Robot doesn’t have much use for the usual structure of big studio animated films. Produced by Dreamworks, its design owes something to the studio’s house style, but its soft, watercolor-inspired touches, vivid palette, and detailed natural world give it a texture all its own (with nods to The Iron Giant, Bambi, Miyazaki, and other influences). Just as strikingly, writer-director Chris Sanders (whose credits include Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon, and The Croods) has little interest in following any expected kids-movie roadmap. The closest thing the film has to a villain doesn’t show up until the film’s final scenes, and even she, correctly, dubs herself “morally neutral.”

Instead, Sanders paces the films to Roz’s development from a sophisticated, single-minded, eager-to-please machine beholden to her programming to a being reshaped, and improved, by the relationships she forms. These include a tenuous friendship with Fink (Pedro Pascal), a fox first drawn to the robot because he senses an easy mark, and Brightbill (Kit Connor), a gosling runt she adopts as an egg after accidentally killing the rest of his family in a fall. (She’s graceful, but also quite heavy.) 

In the central, and best, stretch of The Wild Robot, Roz discovers that her hardwired need to complete any tasks she starts will mean reaching beyond her programming if she’s to serve as Brightbill’s mother. It’s the clearest of several examples of the film’s interest in questioning whether the way things have always been are the way they must always be. Fink, Brightbill, and Roz form an unconventional but functional family. Fink and Roz’s experiences echo that of raising a child with special needs who, in the past, might have been left to wither away. Various crises reveal that the island’s survival will depend on cooperation rather than competition. An extreme weather event and glimpses of the outside world suggest The Wild Robot takes place in a world on the other side of an environmental catastrophe, but the film lets viewers make their own connections between those details and its themes.

For all its artistic and storytelling ambition, The Wild Robot ultimately works because of its winning characters. Roz’s endearing design and Nyong’o’s affecting voice work combine to form one of the year’s most memorable performances. Roz is well-matched both by Fink and Brightbill but also by supporting characters voiced by Catherine O’Hara (as the mother of a succession of cheerfully morbid young possums), Matt Berry (as a grumpy beaver), Mark Hamill (as a sort-of fearsome bear) and others. They’re each part of a strange world in which Roz was never supposed to live, much less change and be changed by. But what’s intended and what’s meant to be don’t always line up. —Keith Phipps

The Wild Robot boots up in theaters everywhere tonight.