Fresh impressions straight after seeing it. I've hidden spoilers in SPOILER so don't click these if you haven't seen it yet.
Wow!! I absolutely loved this movie!! As someone who usually can't stand what passes for cinema nowadays, I knew when I heard about this film it was going to be right up my alley. And boy did it not disappoint. I have never seen anything else at all like this. It has a real surrealist, abstract quality to it. It is a character study, and this fascinating world that's out of a Shakespearean play about ancient Rome, that's been melded with American modernity. The choices of certain shots and scenes with the lighting and camera work, particularly when Cesar gets drunk and stoned at the "bread and circus coliseum" was just fantastic, but there are loads of similar avante garde cinematography throughout the film.
Other choices, such as the pages of a calendar flying, old-school cameras flashing, and newspaper headlines harkened back to the classic black and white era of Hollywood. There's even some element of the 70s and 80s, "Sex, Drugs, & Megalo" the newscaster announces from a CRT tv before a Joan Jett-like rocker plays.
This is a film that is meant to be like a work of art, open to subjective interpretation. It's not meant to spell everything out for you or be taken 100% literally. For instance, the thing about stopping time. I view it as a character study into Cesar. When his wife died, it's like time stopped for him. The outside world ceased to matter and he only lived in himself, in his own bubble where he still loved her, where he was obsessed with her. Then Julia entered his life, and the "stopping time" ended. Instead, he can only stop time for Julia now, representing that he's in love with her and she is his world now.
The plot is as much a classical Shakespearean play--with twists, betrayals, and scheming plots by selfish individuals to further their own power and greed--as it is a reflection on civilizations and societies itself. Shia La Beouf's character represents the self-serving megalomaniacs who rile up the masses to rioting and violence, only to then use their power to make himself the new emperor. Cicero is the traditionalist, fiercely committed to the past, to the present way of doing things, even as it clearly is insufficient and fails the people today. Cesar is that bold visionary whom history won't forget, because he evolved society into the future no one else could imagine until it became ordinary reality taken for granted. The plot is entertaining enough, and is compelling if for no other reason than the sheer audacity of such a novel setting for a plot--but I don't think it's the focal point; rather, the vehicle for examining and dissecting humanity. Its good, its bad, what remains when civilizations die, and how they can return like a phoenix from the ashes of death to a new paradise. The cycle of societies and the personalities that guide the cycle.
If you're the kind of person who enjoys dissecting and analyzing good art for the themes, the relationships, and seeing the metaphors or parallelisms to real history or contemporary events, you're really going to like this. Granted, it might not always be the easiest thing to follow all the time, but that's to its credit. What makes this truly spectacular is the film-making side of it. It has a very abstract, surreal quality to it, almost dreamy at times. It's a film that benefits greatly from the medium of film to tell a narrative, in a way most films often don't take advantage of. It's a cinephile's film, like a visual classical literature, if that makes any sense.
Anyway, I loved it.
I wonder if Megalopolis has come to be a meta-commentary not just on societies themselves, as originally imagined, but even on Hollywood too. That we are in the final decaying days of a Hollywood adamant on re-running the old in perpetuity, even as it flounders and degrades the quality of the original vision with each reiteration, like a game of Chinese Whispers/telephone. Coppola is his own Cesar, daring to go against the tide of corporate Cicero's, to put out something truly remarkable and innovative which will inspire a new generation of films that love films for art, for the worlds they can create, not just low-brow, factory-line productions. To say something because you have something to actually say, not just a bottom line to meet.
You see? That right there is why I love this film. Great art--paintings, songs, poems, literature, etc.-- they have that quality that you can take their mantle and apply their archetypal themes to any scenario, and are able to be interpreted differently by each viewer/reader/listener. It's like cloud gazing or a Rorshach test. That's wonderful.
