It is full of ideas. Over-full, sure, but who cares. The politics are sloppy, the symbolism is all over the place, the actors are performing in five different movies, everything stops dead early on while Adam Driver does five minutes of Hamlet, and who cares. It reaches for something. Something monumental. Its abiding message is not in the film, it’s about the film: it says “this is what I have learned about my artform, this is its history and this is where it could go. This is all I know and all I dream.”
I’m not going to tell you it’s a great film. On some simple shallow levels it may not even be a good film. But it’s all I’ve been able to think about all week and I want to watch it many more times. That, for me, makes it a compelling and valuable and, yes, entertaining film.
If you don’t like your art awash with human ambition and a deep pool of excessive madness, then there’ll be a new Captain America film along soon. MEGALOPOLIS, flawed though it may be, is the shit I live for.