three movies

of Civil War, Oppenheimer, and Megalopolis

Days before my wife gave birth I went and saw Megalopolis. In the long nights where I’m up with the wee bairn in her first week of life, I’ve played all of Mario Wonder and watched Oppenheimer and Civil War.

Since the essays I’ve been planning on writing haven’t been written yet, I’m going to talk about these three movies instead.

It’s been interesting watching these three movies in such close proximity because they’re by directors I think of fondly but also represent interesting elements in what remains of the Hollywood machine.

We’ll start with Civil War.

I’ve been a fan of Alex Garland since reading his debut novel in 2004 or 2005 or whatever year was happening when I was sixteen. I read his other two novels, which were weaker, albeit quite interesting, and I’ve followed his career in Hollywood with excitement. Whether as a writer or director, I think he’s one of the best we have on offer. What that says about Hollywood is an interesting question, but I do think he’s a good filmmaker and a fascinating writer.

Civil War’s premise is the draw. In a time of increasing polarization in the US, many people are talking about the inevitability of societal collapse. In the lead up to 2016, part of me thought that a Clinton victory could spark violence. I didn’t really think it would lead to a civil war, but I think it could have.

And what’s frightening about a civil war in the US as it exists now is that the factions would not be so regional. I mean, a little bit they would be, but every state in the country is split between urban and rural, and this is the axis by which a civil war would play out.

And so every state would have its own localized violence, which is quite a bit more terrifying to me. I mean, if the civil war of 2024 fell along the same boundaries as it did in 1860, I would feel pretty comfortable sitting a thousand miles from the secessionist south.

So we have quite a setup and backdrop to the movie, but then Garland does something quite risky but also more interesting. Rather than take a broad approach and try to describe a society in collapse, the political motivations, the political factions, he zooms waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay in to look at just a handful of people.

Personally, I would have chosen people more disconnected from the violence, but using war journalists as the perspective is a clever move. We get to see the violence close up and we get to meet and talk to a cross section of society at various parts.

I mean, for the most part we’re meeting combatants and the journalists documenting the combat, so not a true cross section of society. But it also keeps it from being a movie of talking heads monologuing about politics, about social topics, and so on.

This is very clever. The execution is solid. It’s not a complete success and sometimes the acting is a bit wooden and awkward, but there’s one scene that stands out above the rest and, I think, justifies the entire movie.

About three fourths of the way through the movie, our journalists are actually having a bit of fun. They run into some Hong Kong based journalists while speeding down a lonely, empty highway, and our two main perspective characters get separated. One of the Hong Kongers gets in Lee’s car while they’re driving and Jessie gets in the other car, which speeds away.

The car Jessie’s in gets caught by some militia men and Lee and her group attempt to save them. And they do this by trying to calmly talk their way out of a situation where a few men with automatic rifles have their friends trapped next to a trench full of bodies.

With the polarization we see everyday in our real lives, people on both sides begin to create narratives about themselves. Everyone believes they would be heroes and stop the nefarious otherside.

“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Someone sent me this today. They saw it on facebook where people were talking about the upcoming election.

It’s funny and fitting, having just watched Civil War, because of how obvious the lie is.

If this person saw a guy with a MAGA hat wandering the streets with an AK47, they would not fight that person. They might call the cops (which, if we’re in a civil war, good luck!) but they would not fight them in the streets.

And this scene in Civil War explains exactly why. The militia men who catch them are completely uninterested in the fact that they’re journalists and therefore not combatants. When they dole out violence, it is precise and without scruple. It is so matter of fact, in fact, that it’s one of the most harrowing scenes I’ve seen in anything in a long time.

The terror comes from the understated nature of the event.

Civil War shows hollowed out cities, battered and broken, where small groups of people with automatic rifles shoot at each other. The combatants hardly seem to care why they’re fighting anymore or who they’re fighting against.

But by focusing so closely on these handful of people, we also end up with a movie about politics that is shockingly apolitical. It’s almost astounding how absent politics are from the movie and narrative. The civil war is a backdrop to a story in the same way a zombie apocalypse might be the backdrop to a different movie about violence and friendship.

Which leads me to Oppenheimer.

Like most American men who remember the year 2000, I was a fan of Christopher Nolan. I’ve seen most of his movies and I’ve liked most of them. I find him exhilarating in very specific ways.

I don’t really love any of his movies and think most of them become actively bad the more times you see them, but I’m exciting by the fact that there is at least one director left in Hollywood who can command huge budgets without making a movie about superheroes or some other kind of existing IP.

I mean, he’s made two big swing SF movies from original concepts, or at least original scripts. I’ve written a bit about him already so I won’t go on in this way but I was very excited to watch this movie, finally.

And it is quite good from a technical perspective. I do think it’s fair to say that Nolan’s talent as a director comes from a technical focus. Every shot is great. His attention to detail, his commitment to visuals, his willingness to bet big on what can be done with a camera rather than how many millions can be poured into CGI after the filming is done.

And Oppenheimer really is a technical marvel. It also has just a stacked cast. Going into it mostly blind, the way I go into most movies (I don’t watch trailers because who cares), I was surprised by how many A-listers were here, even if they were basically just dropping in for a scene or two.

But because this movie is packed with great actors and it’s a historical biopic focused on a single interesting figure, it was, of course, destined to have Oscars thrown at the performances.

My question, though, is, should it have won any?

And, honestly, I’d say No.

Well, maybe for Robert Downey Jr. He really is a scene stealer here and gives a tremendous performance.

Which pains me to say, really, because I love Cillian Murphy. I’ve been a fan of his since, like, 2002 and especially since seeing The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Breakfast on Pluto. So I wanted to see him win this Oscar and knowing that he won it, I went in wanting to bask in his performance.

And it is good. It’s perfectly fine. This isn’t a slight against Murphy, mind, but one against Nolan.

The actors are really not given much to work with to bring their characters to life. Despite this being a biography of J Robert Oppenheimer, you might be surprised by how little you learn about him over the course of three hours. We see two romantic relationships that he has. You might wonder what exactly he liked about either of these women or what they saw in him because none of that’s really in the movie. They’re just thrown together and we accept that because, hey, this is a movie.

And besides, sometimes the most powerful stories are the ones that have you fill in the empty spaces.

But I think that approach is actually quite bad for a biography. These two relationships end up revealing almost nothing about Oppenheimer or the women. We get so little about who and what Oppenheimer actually is that when we start dealing with the way the US government attempted to ruin his life, we’re actually not entirely sure why they’re doing it.

Despite the movie being three hours long, it also feels strangely rushed.

And, like, Civil War, this movie that is ostensibly about politics is weirdly absent of politics. Yes, we see a communist party meeting and some names get thrown around, but the political questions of the time are largely a backdrop to the movie.

And so what is this movie about, if it’s not about the politics or even really the man?

Nolan likes concepts. I’d say that he is a conceptual filmmaker. What drives his work and dominates all his narratives are concepts.

Which makes the dialogue oddly painful at times because no one in this movie ever, even once, just has a normal non-plot related conversation. Even when he meets his lover, they’re talking about concepts. When he meets his wife, who was married at the time, we don’t see passion. We see two people talking about science.

Over and over again, people don’t really have personal conversations. They have conceptual monologues and dialogues, with all characterization comes through body language.

Which is, in theory, kind of cool, but it’s also hard to pull off when so much of the movie has the camera a few feet from Murphy’s face.

Now, I’m not going to say this is a bad movie but I will say it’s overrated. I think it succeeds as entertainment that holds your attention tightly, but I think it actually fails at being a movie about a man, or even a movie about a society.

In some ways, it is a perfect contrast to Civil War, because it has such a wide scope. We see dozens of characters who come in to say some sentence about world affairs or politics. And yet, you could come away from this movie feeling as if you learned nothing about the politics of the time or even the nature of the trial at the fulcrum of the movie.

And now we must talk about Megalopolis.

I love Francis Ford Coppola and so I felt almost duty bound to see this movie. Especially when considering the absurd lengths he went to get it made. He sold his winery! He financed this movie himself!

And some people have the audacity to speak about its box office numbers.

Children, if Coppola was looking to make a movie to make money, he would not have spent his own literal fortune to make it.

He could have shit out some movie for Disney and received a fat paycheck.

This is the movie he needed to make. He felt it so urgently that he literally threw away a fortune to make it real. To give his vision to the world.

And what is this vision?

Well, I will say this: it is the most political of these three movies. While the politics are kind of messy and cartoonish, they are at least present. And they are not subtle.

I typically try to only talk about the work. I feel that the text must speak for itself and we can often ignore the author behind it. The biography of an artist rarely interests me and I’m especially not interested in what they were doing, personally, at the time they were making their art.

But I find this to be an example where it’s difficult to ignore the man behind the camera, since he basically dumped a lifetime of money to make a movie that is…

I mean, how to even describe it?

What is Megalopolis?

For one thing, it is wacky.

And I don’t mean that pejoratively. It feels deliberately wacky. A heightened kind of surrealism that makes it feel like it came from a different era, or from no era at all.

Oppenheimer and Civil War are fully committed to the bit.

This is about real life. You can see the dirt and feel the grit in your teeth.

Megalopolis is not at all like this. It’s operatic in ways. Dizzying in its effect.

What are we to make of a movie that begins with the protagonist literally stopping time?

But this strangeness, this unique vision so at odds with trends and everything happening in Hollywood around this, makes it sort of difficult to put my finger on how I feel about it.

I mean, I love it. I love it the way I love Scrubs but also the way I love my dumb cat and old friends who disappoint me often. I love it like I love kitschy baubles I have from thirty years ago or terrible books that mean so much to me because of how and when and why I experienced them when I did.

Is it a good movie?

Who cares.

Is it well made?

Sometimes!

Is it fun or funny or thought provoking?

All three, but not always for the right reasons.

If you missed it in its theatrical run, I bet you’ll see it in ten years at a midnight showing where people are dressed like Aubrey Plaza and Adam Driver and Shia LaBeouf. People will scream the worst lines of dialogue back at the screen to a crowd of laughing and stoned college kids. It’s a movie that seems almost designed to become a Rocky Horror Picture Show kind of cult hit.

But is this what Coppola wanted?

Certainly not!

And what’s strangest about it, I think, is that while it is this operatic and silly and over the top movie, it’s also a very serious movie with moments that are genuinely beautiful and powerful. Moments of societal critique that hit harder than any other contemporary movie, but then that will be sandwiched between critiques so childish and blunt that you feel a sort of whiplash.

What is this movie?

I find myself wondering that even two weeks later. And that’s actually kind of neat.

It’s a technical marvel, it’s a sloppy mess, it’s a powerful look at society, it’s a childish burlesque.

It’s actually my favorite kind of art. And I guess I spoke about this a bit last week when writing about Stephen King’s It. But I love the grand ambition of the cathedrals of this world, but I love them even more when they’re unfinished, crumbling in on themselves, when they amount to so much yet so little.

Unparalleled ambition and unimaginable beauty and undescribable awe.

I love Megalopolis. I love how it interacts with film history. Love the visual language of it. I even love Driver’s commitment to the film and LaBeouf’s utter madness as he traipses across the screen like Caligula.

It’s gorgeous. It’s a collapsing star. A flooded landscape. A cratered mountain.

It’s beauty is in its failure but especially through the shafts of light that are succeeding. Those glimpses of genius piercing through the mad disaster.

And so I’d actually recommend it over Civil War or Oppenheimer, which are both, in a narrow sense, much better movies. Those movies give you what movies are supposed to, or at least what audiences have come to expect when they go to the theatre or stream from their couches.

But Megalopolis is this transdimensional wrecking ball showing us what movies can be. Perhaps, even, what they ought to be.