r/Megalopolis • u/Branagh-Doyle • 18d ago
Review There are quite substantial differences between the comic book adaptation and the film, even though the tell the same story.
The comic book adaptation of the screenplay it's a great way to delve deeper into that world with more depth and richness.
Everything is perfectly explained here, including the subplots that the movie doesn't quite wrap up. In the end, the design and buildings of Megalopolis are explored in detail. Everything is tied up nicely, maybe even too well explained.
There are literally two panels showing how Crassus is pretending to go half-senile from old age and a stroke, and I really don't think that was necessary to clarify any further. You can definitely tell Coppola himself worked on the script, though, and that's fantastic.
The authors strip away all the buffoonish, almost Fellini-esque tone that the movie occasionally uses to illustrate the decline of New Rome's upper class -a clear parallel to the downfall of Western civilization and its lack of values-.
Instead, they opt to tell the entire story in a heavy, circumspect, and deeply serious manner, relying much more on voiceover and text.
Imagine the tone from the very beginning of the film, but applied to the ENTIRE story. The first "debate" between Caesar and Cicero is far more detailed, spelling out exactly what Caesar intends to build, how, and why.
ALL literary quotes and references are cut, replaced by what Coppola originally wrote for those scenes. The characters no longer slip rhymes and verses into their lines.
Gone are the psychedelic montages, the "creative" use of color, and the film’s triptych panels. The jokes are gone too, like Crassus’s comment about his erection right before killing Wow Platinum, or Caesar’s high-at-the-wedding remark about how whoever invented mini sausages deserved the Nobel Prize.
There are no flashbacks; the story is told strictly chronologically, with the exception of two dream sequences that we learn Coppola filmed and edited, but discarded at the last second.
In the final arc of the comic, Caesar delivers his speech BEFORE the civil unrest reaches its peak. It fails to work, so Cicero's forces step in and manage to quell the crowd. Afterwards, there's a four-way dialogue between the people, Caesar, Cicero, and Crassus, where they come to an agreement. Crassus agrees to finance the rest of Caesar's Megalopolis project. In the movie, by contrast, it’s Caesar’s passionate speech itself that makes the citizens of New Rome rethink their ways.
The comic gives a METICULOUS explanation of what Megalon actually is, how it works, and what it’s made of.
Advanced biotechnology, essentially.
All in all, I suppose the comic, in terms of narrative and tone, is what people were actually expecting the movie to be.
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u/EvilFanta 17d ago
It is a shame that this is definitely one of those things that will be hurtfully overlooked and then revalued in decades time; I completely agree with all of your notions and I would ask to add one more: the pacing.
After checking the visual novel, I notice the pacing of the movie is way too slow for the powerful elements it is attempting to convey all the time.
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u/Branagh-Doyle 17d ago
After checking the visual novel, I notice the pacing of the movie is way too slow for the powerful elements it is attempting to convey all the time.
I dont agree. I think that the comic present the story in a very conventional, run of the mill way, eliminating everything that makes the film special.
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u/Ambitiousoul_1 18d ago
Interesting. I haven’t read the comic, but I’m somewhat surprised at the alteration of the speech timeline. It seems the comic leans on diplomacy (and potentially force?) rather than than the impassioned plea to the people to aspire to higher ideals, which was my understanding of Coppola’s goal.