Monday new releases: 30 September 2024

Megalopolis, The Wild Robot, Transformers One, Harold & the Purple Crayon are in cinemas and Wolfs is on Apple TV+

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.