On the ripe previous age of 85, Francis Ford Coppola is coming for the haters. The most recent trailer for the director’s self-funded science-fiction epic Megalopolis begins with a rare denunciation of the critics who’ve wronged his films previously. As an train in hubris and decades-long grudge-holding, it instructions respect.
“True genius is usually misunderstood,” intones Laurence Fishburne — one of many stars of the film, doing his greatest trailer man voice — earlier than a montage of quotes exhibiting well-known critics being imply about a few of Coppola’s best-loved films. “Diminished by its artsiness,” Pauline Kael mentioned of The Godfather. Vincent Canby decried Apocalypse Now as “Hole on the core.” Bram Stoker’s Dracula is “a triumph of favor over substance,” in keeping with Roger Ebert. (Ebert truly fairly preferred it.) These idiots simply weren’t forward-looking sufficient to get what Coppola was doing, clearly. “One filmmaker has at all times been forward of his time,” Fishburne purrs, earlier than describing Megalopolis as “an occasion nothing can put together you for.”
The implication — other than that Coppola is a genius, and critics suck — is that Megalopolis belongs on this lofty canon, and you need to ignore the evaluations and go see it earlier than it’s inevitably reevaluated as a visionary traditional. It’s true that the film, which stars Adam Driver as an architect hoping to revive a crumbling, decadent metropolis after a horrible catastrophe, reportedly baffled studios and acquired considerably blended evaluations after screening on the Cannes movie pageant. However lots from the vital neighborhood have rallied round it, praising Coppola for precisely the devil-may-care audacity that the trailer quite grumpily defends, together with such astute and passionate voices as The New Yorker’s Justin Chang and Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri.
Possibly it’s not simply bitter grapes, although. The trailer’s framing of Coppola as “misunderstood” will get forward of the inevitable narrative in regards to the film’s wildly indulgent manufacturing (it value $120 million of Coppola’s personal cash) versus its modest field workplace hopes. It additionally leans into the director’s firebrand repute and his admittedly patchy filmography, which features a run of 4 straight masterpieces within the Nineteen Seventies — The Godfather, The Dialog, The Godfather Half II and Apocalypse Now — in addition to his fair proportion of swings-and-misses and expensive boondoggles like One from the Coronary heart and The Cotton Membership.
Which of those classes will Megalopolis fall into? There’s just one method to discover out, says this trailer — and it’s not by studying evaluations.
