10.1.24 - Megalopolis review: a movie about the Chrysler building
No people don’t talk like that but is a world where they did really that implausible? Isn’t the way we all talk and write really what’s strange?
A world where the elite of society walk around quoting Marcus Aurelius and have really on the nose philosophical debates about history, the state, civilization——doesn’t that make more sense than what’s going on right now? If you only described our world and the current problems in first principles to an alien, wouldn’t they expect at least the people in charge to talk like this?
A world where like Elon Musk and a State Governor get into verbal duels over a passion project that could revitalize/ruin a city in front of an audience of socialites——again would that really be that weird?
In a sense, this movie is “hyperreal.” It’s a dramatization of the sort of debates that really happen in society today. But it’s not subtle at all. It’s refreshingly not subtle, not couched in layers of reference, irony, group signaling, proxies for other ideas——the characters all directly address their beliefs, motivations, and plans. I’ve heard the acting described as wooden, bad, of bizarre. To me, it really feels evocative of what was going on Star Wars Episode II and III. The dialogue is memorable. It’s really on the nose. It’s heavily stylized. It’s like watching a play or something. It was charming and fascinating to listen to.
Honestly, I was pretty twisted watching this movie, so maybe my perceptions were just off, but I never felt like the way people talked or acted was THAT weird.
My friend described it as a “movie from the SyFy channel.” I understand where he’s coming from, in that I had this sort of weird vibe——that could be construed as either hyper-cinematic or circling all the way back to anti-cinematic, the way TV movies feel. It’s wobbling on the threshold between those two.
But what this movie really made me think of was a Tim Burton film like Edward Scissorhands, or the live action How the Grinch Stole Christmas movie. It’s like those movies not in their style, but in the sense that it builds a very strange world, where people look and talk strange, and you kind of just take it at face value. Yes, I guess the Whos talk like that and this is what their community is like. That’s all fine, I’m going to watch the movie. In that sense, it also has a Spy Kids 3 vibe. Or shades of Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby. This is not a naturalistic world. This is a fantasy world. Just not a kind that has been tried on screen before.
I’m also noticing that the movies I mentioned so far have some visual elements in common with this movie. This movie has that early 2000s CG glitzy look, but not in a bad way really. Kinda how King Kong (2005) felt (but with far lower production value). Really Baz Luhrman’s Great Gatsby is actually very close to the CGI employment here. There was this era of movies where there was a very specific level of CG rendering, and the environments were very CGI, and it just had this really uncanny look to it. It looks like that. In that way, the movie is dated, almost in the way Venom felt like a movie right out of 2007.
The set design, which I thought was interesting——seemed to have some really nice mixes of Art Deco, Rome, and Jetsons futurism——does sometimes just look a bit cheap. That’s really my only complaint, is that for a glittering metropolis, things don’t feel expensive. I don’t know if the budget was a lot.
But if you look at it like a play, which I did, it looks good. When you watch even an expensive broadway show, it all looks phony, it’s not supposed to look real, it’s just meant to tell a story. And it does that effectively. The original Star Trek had really shitty production value and those are some of the best stories I’ve seen on screen.
As far as the themes, I’m getting really strong Incredibles, Ayn Rand, somewhat reactionary vibes from this movie. The politics of it seem pretty on the nose, and I won’t endorse them or refute them, but it is interesting. Here are some loose thoughts:
- It’s clear that Giancarlo Esposito or “state” in this movie is meant to reflect a conservative, but also left of center inclination towards material security, just keeping things running, keeping it the way it is
- Sometimes this aesthetic or civilizational impulse in politics has been associated with totalitarianism, think about Hitler, Mao——in this movie it’s identified with the private sector. So very Ayn Rand vibes.
- This movie suggests the destruction of the old is necessary to build what we were meant to——even if people have to die.
- Aubrey Plaza, is an old timey caricature of the media, the media being a literal whore for power
- There’s a synthesis at the end, with the old guard giving way to the civilizational impulse, letting progress happen
Really, there’s a YouTube video essay that probably breaks it all down better, and I just want to get my thoughts down more than anything. But its clear that, as far as politics, this is a very “topical” movie about progress, the relationship between the private and public sector, the civilizational impulse versus the needs of “people.” It suggests that exceptional people, even flawed ones, wrapped up in their own egos and visions, aren't evil——maybe the people holding them back are. I enjoyed it. I was never bored. It made me want to go home and read history.
What more can you ask for in a movie?
Finally, when I was smacked watching this movie, I had a loose thought that this movie seems to be about the Chrysler Building. The Chrysler building is a character in this movie, it keep showing up over and over again. It’s deliberately framed in shots to be like a character in the city.
I was doing an informational interview of sorts at a law firm building in Manhattan, and it had a tremendous view of the Chrysler Building. I was looking at it with the partner talking to me and I mentioned to her that the Chrysler Building always looked super out of place, like they built it thinking it was going to be the first of many buildings in that style. It felt like it was supposed to kick off the future.
The Empire State Building doesn’t look out of place in this way. It’s certainly stands out, but it definitely feels like the world around it sort of picked up its vibe. Not the Chrysler building. And fwiw, the Empire State Building is not featured in this way, it’s always sort of out of focus and unimportant.
What this movie feels like is the world that the people who built the Chrysler building probably imagined developing. It’s a future they could have imagined. It’s an abandoned timeline.
My analogies are sometimes stretched, but this is similar to the way I have a separate world in my mind for a timeline where Kanye dropped Yandhi. That world would have different music, different clothes, it would have had different aesthetics altogether——Kanye/hip hop really drive big factions of culture. The Yandhi snippet/teaser that dropped——with that original version of Hurricane that was a lot more autotuney and experimental——was a glimpse into a timeline that just never materialized. That’s what the Chrysler Building is, architecturally.
And this movie decided to depict that timeline. A timeline with where technological progress continued to be physical, not digital——no smartphones in sigh (because smartphones aren’t cinematic. We don’t like how we look using them. So we don’t like depicting ourselves using them. We have a deep shame about how we look at screens. Much to think about). Where decadence and fashion built out from the patterns of the 1920s. A world where it seems like the sexual revolution of the 1960s never happened and gender relations remained fundamentally patriarchal (women in this movie all basically play the kind of roles you’d see in an old movie, they’re conduits for the relations between the male characters, channels for power). A world where we actually conceived ourselves as an American colossus, an inheritor of Rome and western civilization.
It was good. While the world of the movie is not the world any of us would like to live in (I think), it is a movie that reminds you that a better world is possible——at a cost.
knxnts