About That 'Megalopolis' Trailer
Thoughts on criticism and the 'Megalopolis' trailer.
A new trailer recently arrived, and has now been pulled, for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. The controversy: the trailer was filled with fabricated quotes from legendary critics including Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert. The intention was obviously to play up Coppola’s ahead-of-his-time genius by presenting critics failing to recognize the brilliance of The Godfather or Apocalypse Now at the time of their release.
Critics simply can’t be trusted to recognize true vision, I guess. I haven’t seen Megalopolis yet, but it seems like that might play into some of the themes of the movie. In that sense the trailer is not necessarily bad as a concept. The problem is that when scrutinized, quotes like Kael’s and Sarris’s could not be found. But why let facts get in the way of a good trope?
Here’s what critic Bilge Ebiri had to say at Vulture:
Taking on critics might be an exciting and cathartic marketing tactic, but I suspect Megalopolis will need critics championing it when it actually comes out. And making up fake quotes from our heroes is probably not the best way to get us on your side.
The critic is often positioned as the enemy not just of the visionary but of everyone else, too. I’m reminded, as I often am, of the villainous food critic at the end of Ratatouille:
In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.
As it happens, that trailer is a piece of junk, and our collective criticism on the subject is bound to be more meaningful than yet another instance of truth being washed out with the AI tide. In our current Rotten Tomatoes hellscape, good criticism is more necessary than ever, and we have to actively resist anyone who would pump this computer-hallucinated sludge into our veins.