Spoiler alert.

The climax of Mickey 17 is people voting harder, and colonizing innocently. The climax of Megalopolis is a tech oligarch giving a speech, and then everybody lives better through technology. Both films start OK enough, but they cannot stick the ending. As Mark Fisher said, “environmental catastrophe features in late capitalist culture only as a kind of simulacra, its real implications for capitalism too traumatic to be assimilated into the system.”

Capitalist culture is increasingly stuck in a reboot loop, strip mining people's childhoods for scraps. But it's not all bad. Bong Joon Ho and Francis Ford Coppola are both very good directors, but Mickey 17 and Megalopolis are far from their best work. From occupied Korea to preoccupied America, they simply cannot process the culture they're embedded in.

In Mickey 17, a man is copied 17 times and given a torturous workload. He takes it because earth is ruined, and the whole crew watches him suffer because that's the system. It's an obviously dystopian world, but these sins are all dumped on one Trumpian figure, and when he's killed, it all improbably turns. The space colonists elect a black woman and begin colonizing innocently. It's absurd.

It was true when Aime Césaire said, “no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force is already a sick civilization a civilisation which is morally diseased.” Ho spends most of the film showing a sick civilization, but then improbably heals it ‘by voting harder’. This makes no sense in this world or even within the cinematic universe he created.

It's the same thing in Megalopolis. The world is obviously dystopian, an allegorical ruin called New Rome, and the lead character is part of the corrupt ruling families. He's a tech oligarch with some magical solution, produced by vibes and hallucination. He obsesses about architecture while demolishing homes. He talks about pie in the sky while people starve. When those people finally riot, he gives a saccharine speech to them, pie magically appears, and the people are becalmed. Douchebag ex machina. It's completely unbelievable, and incongruent with the rest of the film.

In this, Coppola perpetrates what Fisher called ‘ideological blackmail.’ Mark said, “The ideological blackmail that has been in place since the original Live Aid concerts in 1985 has insisted that ‘caring individuals’ could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganization.” In Megalopolis, the corrupt oligarchy of New Rome isn't overthrown, it's just turned over to the right oligarch, who marries the corrupt cop/mayor's daughter and produces an heir named Sunny Hope. Megalopolis is an interestingly self-indulgent film, but the ending is just rote pablum.

Both of these films are actually more complete if you just assume the character dies when they're about to. If you assume that everything afterwards is a dream, then it makes sense. That's how the dystopia you spend two acts in suddenly becomes a utopia. Because the main character died, and you went with them.

What neither film can process is that the culture they're embedded in is itself dying and deserves it. Western culture revels in trauma, but the end of western culture itself is too traumatic to assimilate. For decades now, western culture has been able to digest its rebellions, but in a time of actual rebellion they feel nauseous and sick. The history's all coming up the wrong way, and it's not pretty.

The whole White Empire made so many movies about good Germans during the Holocaust and good whites during slavery/Jim Crow that they thought they were actually good people. They made so many movies about bad Russians and Arabs that they thought these were their enemies. The ruling corporations made a killing twice, once on the crimes and genocides, and again on the film rights. This worked for a charm for decades, but the spell is broken now. Now such self-indulgence just feels decadent and deranged.

While Mickey 17 and Megalopolis can manage a critique of the system well enough in the first two acts, they cannot accept a collapse of the system and must resurrect it, however improbably, in the third. But the cognitive dissonance rings terribly hollow when we know that no one colonized innocently and that tech oligarchs aren't going to save us. That's all happening (or not happening) right now, and it can no longer be covered up by the cinema's glow.