Co-Geeking

The first trailer for Megalopolis by director Francis Ford Coppola is out:

Megalopolis (2024) Official Trailer – Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel by Lionsgate Movies on YouTube

Strictly speaking, this is, in fact, the second iteration for a trailer. There was a bit of a kerfuffle, for the first version of the trailer was taken down because it included fake quotes from critics, which reportedly may have been algorithmically generated.

I have to say that I’m not wowed. It’s very pretty to look at, beautifully cinematic, even breathtaking at times. However, it really doesn’t seem to be a movie for me.

We’re not in the 80s or 90s anymore, when just about any SFFnal movie was sure to get my eyeballs simply by existing. Then, for a while during and after the aughts, handsome effects and CGI often got me to see a movie I wouldn’t necessarily have seen at the theater otherwise. Now we have reached a saturation point. For a good long while I have just not been able to be bothered about seeing a new release at the theater unless there’s something special about it, or a movie hits a very particular interest of mine.

(I will certainly not take the trouble, if trailers merely make a movie look like a whole bunch of men doing man-things and relegates women to the sidelines. It’s one thing to place your story in a society where minorities aren’t formally given recognition by the society, but there’s a huge difference between writing or filming those minorities in a dismissive way and a respectful way. I found Oppenheimer, for example, a wonderful example of the latter.)

Even reading that Megalopolis is loosely based on Roman history (the Catilinarian Conspiracy in 63 BCE involving an aristocrat attempting to overthrow the Republic) didn’t make it more interesting to me. Granted, the time stop gimmick is slightly interesting, but I confess that it, too, lost its appeal by the end of the trailer.

It is a shame I won’t see more of Nathalie Emmanuel, whose work in the Fast & Furious franchise and in Game of Thrones I’ve liked. Perhaps I’ll find Megalopolis in the library, if it’s ever imported to Finland. At this writing it doesn’t look like it, but we’ll see.

Megalopolis opens on September 27, 2024.

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.