Monday new releases: 30 September 2024

I’m usu­ally hes­it­ant to try and con­struct a theme around what is essen­tially a ran­dom col­lec­tion of films appear­ing at the same time but this week one has jumped out at me.

All five of the new releases this week are essen­tially about char­ac­ters being assigned a role in soci­ety and choos­ing to defy that role.

Adam Driver as Cesar in Megalopolis refuses to let polit­ic­al and social norms pre­vent him from build­ing a new uto­pia. Roz in The Wild Robot (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) is a ser­vice robot who dis­cov­ers the joy and pain of moth­er­hood. In Transformers One, two Energon miners on the plan­et Cybertron (voiced by Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry) dream of lives with great­er pur­pose. Story book char­ac­ter Harold (Zachary Levi) goes search­ing for mean­ing in the real world when the voice of his nar­rat­or dis­ap­pears in Harold & the Purple Crayon. And two age­ing gun­slingers (Brad Pitt and George Clooney) real­ise that their days of proud inde­pend­ence are numbered in Wolfs.

In all these films (except one), these jour­neys of ful­fil­ment pri­or­it­ise per­son­al actu­ation rather than fam­ily or com­munity. These are hero’s jour­neys where the most import­ant thing is ful­filling what you believe your des­tiny is. Everyone else is just ‘little people’.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s dis­con­cert­ingly per­son­al (con­fes­sion­al?) epic Megalopolis, Adam Driver plays Cesar Catilina, a prop­erty developer and city plan­ner remin­is­cent of the fam­ous bur­eau­crat Robert Moses, who over many dec­ades shaped the New York City we know now without ever sub­mit­ting to the indig­nit­ies of an elec­tion. His gift was per­suad­ing oth­ers of his vis­ion and when he couldn’t per­suade people he went ahead and did what he wanted any­way. Forgiveness versus per­mis­sion, that sort of deal.

In a ver­sion of future New York that is ruled over by the rem­nants of a Roman empire – scrap­pily rep­res­en­ted as there are American flags around even though the film pre­sumes it doesn’t exist – Catilina has won the Nobel Prize for the inven­tion of an extraordin­ary new mir­acle mater­i­al he calls Megalon. He wishes to rebuild the city out of this new sub­stance because – and he expects people to just trust him on this – it will be bet­ter for every­one, even though the eggs in this omelette are the homes of ordin­ary people.

But no one in New Rome give much of a stuff for ordin­ary people. They aren’t cit­izens and only cit­izens (i.e. elites) can vote but that doesn’t stop the elec­ted may­or Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) wor­ry­ing that his cur­rent con­stitu­ency cares less about a dis­tant future that they will nev­er see and more about their cur­rent qual­ity of life – includ­ing all the dec­ad­ent dis­trac­tions of the mod­ern world.

Catilina has one oth­er tal­ent that sets him above the rest of the city. He can stop time around him and – essen­tially – con­sider the world without hav­ing to react to it constantly.

This is sort of how artists work – art freezes moments in time and film­makers espe­cially can manip­u­late time to their own ends. I ima­gine Coppola com­ing up with this image at the very begin­ning of his career as he paused the film on a Steenbeck edit­ing machine for the first time.

So, Catilina’s super­power is also Coppola’s. And Catilina’s prob­lems are also Coppola’s – how to be left alone to cre­ate your mas­ter­pieces without inter­fer­ence from ignor­ant fin­an­ci­ers demand­ing unsoph­ist­ic­ated things like profit.

And, fam­ously, Coppola has solved that prob­lem with Megalopolis by using his own money, mean­ing that the con­struc­tion of the film is as much a reflec­tion of its themes as the fin­ished product is.

Ah, the fin­ished product. I had to get to it even­tu­ally, I sup­pose. I described it on the radio on Friday night as “a mas­ter­piece in a cat­egory of one”. It’s messy and uneven. It’s clearly the work of an older man whose sexu­al polit­ics haven’t kept up with the times. But it’s often breath­tak­ing and bold and lib­er­at­ing. It takes chances.

Driver is per­fect for this sort of thing. His his­tory of com­mit­ting totally to weird and won­der­ful icon­o­clast­ic dir­ect­ori­al vis­ions is second-to-none – Annette, any­one? – and he has some won­der­ful moments, includ­ing an homage to Martin Sheen’s fam­ous drunk­en break­down in Apocalypse Now.

But every­one gets that they are play­ing in an oper­at­ic register, line read­ings are almost sung in places, and what sub­tlety there is only works when there are extremes for con­trast. Special men­tion should go to Jon Voight (now 85) who I think is doing an imper­son­a­tion of Christopher Walken and as a res­ult is deli­ciously weird throughout.

I’m not a great believ­er in that whole ‘great man’ the­ory – I was reminded of how attract­ive Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was to a cer­tain kind of self-confident, self-made man watch­ing Bert Cooper recom­mend it to Don Draper in the “Hobo Code” epis­ode of Mad Men last night – but it clearly mat­ters to a man who, like Catilina, was once called a geni­us and was then thwarted by the phil­istines around him.

But also, like Catilina, Coppola under­stands that pub­lic con­fid­ence and private doubts are both included in the pack­age of great­ness, as is the sup­port of a self­less life part­ner who you can con­fess those doubts to. Megalopolis is ded­ic­ated to Eleanor Coppola who passed away earli­er this year,

The Wild Robot is the most beau­ti­ful anim­ated film I have seen in a long time. Written and dir­ec­ted by Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon), adapt­ing a book by Peter Brown, it has a hand-painted aes­thet­ic1 that feels glor­i­ously organ­ic, des­pite com­puters still being at the heart of it all.

A ser­vice robot in a crate washes up on the shores of an unin­hab­ited island. Uninhabited by humans, that is. The anim­al res­id­ents are under­stand­ably freaked out by the arrival of this shiny new spe­cies but her machine learn­ing abil­it­ies allow her to dis­cov­er everyone’s lan­guage and – after an unfor­tu­nate acci­dent – she takes on the role of rear­ing an orphan gos­ling chick.

In the spir­it of emo­tion­al fam­ily films like Iron Giant, this has the capa­city to wreck young audi­ences – and quite a few par­ents too, I expect – but for me it lost its way in the third act when the science-fiction aspects were allowed to takeover and it got too punchy, too smashy.

In Megalopolis, Cesar Catilina invents a magic­al new mater­i­al called Megalon. In Transformers One, the ori­gin story for the fam­ous toy robots Optimus Prime and his nemes­is Megatron, the magic­al mater­i­al is called Energon. It powers the plan­et Cybertron but its bounteous flow has mys­ter­i­ously dried up and can now only be found deep in the the heart of the planet.

Energon miner Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) dreams of bet­ter things, of help­ing his hero Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm) dis­cov­er the miss­ing Matrix of Leadership which will guide them to the source of the Energon and restart the flow, restor­ing health and prosper­ity to everyone.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

What Pax, and his best mate D‑16 (Brian Tyree Henry), dis­cov­er is in fact a cor­rupt soci­ety that is determ­ined to pre­vent all but a chosen few cit­izens from achiev­ing their birth­right as Transformers – a sur­pris­ingly polit­ic­al mes­sage for what is effect­ively a very expens­ive Saturday morn­ing cartoon.

We dis­cov­er that the ety­mo­logy of the word Autobots (the hero­ic Transformers) is actu­ally ‘autonomy’, free­dom being the most import­ant word in the American language.

Like The Wild Robot, there is a moose and a por­cu­pine in Harold & the Purple Crayon, but these ones aren’t nearly as cute.

They are car­toon com­pan­ions for Harold in his story­books – writ­ten and illus­trated by Crockett Johnson in the 1950s – when Harold was a tod­dler for whom everything he drew came to life. In the film, car­toon Harold has reached young adult­hood and one day the voice nar­rat­ing his life goes silent so he and his mates go to “the real world” – Rhode Island played by Atlanta, Georgia – to find the ‘old man’.

Much digit­al wiz­ardry then ensues as the char­ac­ters in human form (Zachary Levi, Lil Red Howery and Tanya Reynolds) get up to many hijinks thanks to their inno­cents abroad mis­un­der­stand­ings of how things work here.

Jemaine Clement does his usu­al thing – with his usu­al kiwi accent – as the vil­lain determ­ined to claim the cray­on for himself.

If Transformers One is a Saturday morn­ing car­toon with a multi-million dol­lar budget, Harold is a pro-am school hol­i­day church hall pro­duc­tion with a multi-million dol­lar budget.

Like Megalopolis, the man­u­fac­tur­ing of Jon Watts’ comedy-thriller Wolfs is as indi­vis­ible from its themes as the fin­ished product. If you were hop­ing that a reunion of Brad Pitt and George Clooney would bring back the glory days of the Oceans’ pic­tures, this down­beat film will be a dis­ap­point­ment, but it’s not unin­ter­est­ing or unsuc­cess­ful on its own terms.

Mr. Pitt and Mr. Clooney play two fix­ers for organ­ised crime in New York. Because they usu­ally work alone, they are unaware of each other’s exist­ence until the night a young man in his under­wear per­ishes in the hotel room of a ‘tough on crime’ loc­al dis­trict attor­ney (Amy Ryan).

Called by two seper­ate parties, they both arrive to do the clean up and are forced to work togeth­er, des­pite the usu­al ego clashes you get when experts pub­licly com­pete with each other.

The job then pro­ceeds to get more com­plic­ated when the deceased would-be gigolo (Austin Abrams) wakes up and starts run­ning around.

This is a film about two age­ing mas­ters, both real­ising that the world they thought they knew is leav­ing them behind. There’s a hint of The Wild Bunch in the final act as they start to come to terms with the fact that they are not in con­trol of their situ­ation any longer – if they ever really were – and they can’t even be sure where the real money and power is any longer.

Unlike films where they are paid to be char­ac­ter act­ors (for example The Midnight Sky in Clooney’s case and Ad Astra in Pitt’s), this is a film that relies on their star power and their screen per­so­nas. When you take that big screen energy – that old school, red car­pet, cham­pagne cork, Vanity Fair cov­er, other-worldly, un-reality – and send it straight to stream­ing, you can’t help but dimin­ish them.

Which is, I think, what the film itself is sug­gest­ing. Is their time com­ing to an end?