Here, presented in no particular order, are some things that happen in Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-the-making passion project Megalopolis:
– Adam Driver, playing an urban planner named Cesar Catilina, who can stop time and does very little with his mostly unexplained power.
– Cesar also possesses a magical substance (not The Substance) called Megalon that he uses to build a futuristic and poorly CGI’d utopia.
– There’s a Soviet satellite hurtling towards Earth, because why?
– Chloe Fineman flubs a line, and it’s left in the movie.
– Dustin Hoffman dies in a confusing flashback.
– I watched Megalopolis at an Alamo Drafthouse, so I had to keep quiet, but in an unregulated theater, I would have given a loud standing ovation to, “If the baby is a girl, we’ll name her Sunny Hope. and if it’s a boy, Francis.”
– A 16-year-old virgin pop star is sold to the highest bidder, except it turns out she’s not a virgin or underage; she’s 23 and part of a deep-fake scandal.
– A bedridden Jon Voight pretends to have an erection, only for him to pull back a blanket and reveal that it’s actually a bow, which he uses to shoot two people, including an alt-right Shia LaBeouf, with arrows.
Megalopolis is a crazy movie. But is it a good movie? A bad movie? A movie that’s so bad, it’s good? The answer to all three is: yes. If it sounds like I didn’t enjoy Megalopolis, but I swear that’s not the case. I had a blast, even if I didn’t know what was happening 70 percent of the time. If the guy who made The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now wants to make a “what if ancient Rome was current New York City” epic that he personally financed through wine money, I’m there on opening weekend. More movies should be this unpredictable and weird. But even if you’re not a fan, there’s at least one undeniable performance: Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum.
Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, and Giancarlo Esposito all do fine work, but Plaza is the one who understands the assignment. As sexpot reporter Wow Platinum, the Emily the Criminal actress has the clearest understanding of Megalopolis by leaning into the camp where others play it straight. She tells Cesar that he’s “anal as hell,” but that’s fine because she’s “oral as hell.” She marries Voight’s Hamilton Crassus III in a scheme to get his riches, and perfectly emulates what it must be like being around Jon Voight in real life. She explains that she got the name Wow Platinum on the way to Penn Station, whatever that means. Never before has a fan cam been more necessary.
Plaza (who is also excellent in My Old Ass) told Deadline that once she finished filming Megalopolis, she could still feel Wow Platinum’s crackling presence. “She was wildly confident and not scared of anything. And I would say that there were days for sure where I felt empowered by the character, because I think my confidence lies mainly in my work,” she explained. “There were certain things that would normally take me down, or normally I’d have a hard time, and I felt that Wow was really fueling me, giving me strength.”
Wow Platinum is Aubrey Plaza’s Janet Snakehole, and she plays her with a just-right amount of dry wit and bravado. She’s funny in an often unintentionally hilarious movie, and effortlessly sexy in deeply unsexy scenes, like the one where she demands LaBeouf’s Clodio Pulcher call her “Auntie Wow” while he’s going down on her. It’s a true movie star performance.
Megalopolis has its issues, but Plaza isn’t one of them. Wow, indeed.