For the last decade or so, it has sometimes seemed as if Hollywood has lost its grandest ambition—not merely to entertain, provoke, or create art, but to pursue and portray America's national myths, to reflect the nation back on itself in new and revelatory ways. In 2024, however, we got two such attempts.
The first was aging legend Francis Ford Coppola's ill-conceived spectacle, Megalopolis, a movie that recast New York City as a modern vestige of the Roman Empire. Megalopolis was weird and wooden and flat-out bizarre in almost every aspect, but even in its failure, there was something vital about it, an urgency about taking life and society and the idea of the future seriously.
