Now it’s an Outrunopolis moment for movie fans

I suggest there’s another moment like this, available to you in cinemas this week. Call it “Outrunopolis”. Meaning Saoirse Ronan in Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun, and Adam Driver in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.

At first glance, they seem antithetical. A narrowly focused story of one young Orcadian woman’s recovery from alcoholism. An expansive SF fable dealing with the grandest themes of power, leadership and technology.

But at least to my eyes and ears, they talk to each other, and rectify each others’ deficits, quite perfectly. Here’s the big questions they jointly ask: What is it to be a restless, inventive, desirous human animal, possessing transforming technology (and technique)? And how can we cause more healing than damage as we barrel across the planet?

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Let’s start with a quirk both movies share. Each of the lead protagonists – head of New Rome’s director of design, Cesar (played by Driver), the party-loving Orcadian biology student Rona (played by Ronan) – have a thing about believing they can personally control their physical environments.

Cesar seems to be able to stop time; and since her childhood in Orkney, Rona has always felt she was able to orchestrate the island’s winds and waves.

In Megalopolis, Cesar’s power is a metaphor Coppola uses to symbolise the level of ambition required, to complete great works or causes. In The Outrun, Rona’s fantasy is compensatory: she’s witnessed the domestic storms caused by her father’s bi-polar extremes (he literally smashes the cottage windows one night, to let the winter gales in).

Another faculty the films jointly explore: Cesar and Rona are both world-builders, as humans with technology and desires tend to be. But they’re operating on vastly different scales (though with surprisingly similar personal impacts).

The thrust of Coppola’s plot is the building of the “megalopolis” of the title. This is a utopian enclave within the general ruin and decline of the New Rome (read New York) metropolis.

Its design is enabled, in all its glowing neo-organic glory, by a new building material (invented by Cesar) called Megalon. This substance brims with energy, and is able to change shape according to the needs of citizens; it promises a luxurious existence beyond scarcity and need. Here, Coppola articulates the geek engineer’s fondest dream.

Rona also has her own version of Megalon, with which she tries (and fitfully succeeds) to build her world – what we could call her “Minilopolis”. Its elements are repetitive beats, alcohol/pills, fairweather mates, and an available dancefloor or club.

Whatever personal abysses Rona’s London hedonism is failing to fill, the Outrun is a brilliant depiction of the wild freewheel of big-city lifestyle. Saoirse Ronan is surely Oscar-worthy for the way she embodies a girl who lives it larger, and ever larger, until Londinium’s pleasure domes crash down upon her (or she through them).

(Image: THE OUTRUN FILM LTD - ROY IMER/COURTESY OF SUNDANCE INSTITUTE)

The arrogant, visionary executive, and the broken addicted student, would seem to be at their most unequal (at this point of my comparison). But Rona turns out to have a resource which Cesar seems unable to access. Which is: raw and unprocessed nature.

I was trying to identify what was so claustrophobic about such an explicitly grandiose movie as Megalopolis. And it’s that we never see the characters in anything other than the constructed environments of the city.

Watching The Outrun—where the elemental landscape and pounding waves of Orkney are key to Rona’s recovery—makes that obvious.

But what’s also clear is how much more sophisticated and subtle Rona’s world of modernity is. Megalopolis hangs on the struggle between two technological paradigms. It’s a mighty and epochal clash, causing riots, coups, attempted assasinations.

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In The Outrun, by comparison, a profound technological settlement has been quietly made. Despite the often shocking ruggedness of Orkney’s islands, there’s always a signal on every device in this movie.

They make possible many moments of character development or plot development. Techno-modernity is embedded, its systems gently enabling life’s dramas.

It’s on Skype that Rona’s dad conducts one of his bi-polar episodes, which helps her realise she can’t feel responsible for his condition. When she takes a job with the Orkney RSPB, tracking corncrakes, Rona has to use the GPS on her smartphone, registering from which field their distinctive cry is coming. It’s by means of texts and voicemails that the film charts the breakdown of Rona’s big loves, and her progress towards responsibility and apology.

(Image: Archive)

There’s a stunning sequence, when Rona is digging deep into her self-imposed exile on the isle of Papay. In the evenings, she’s using her laptop and bandwidth to track airflights in the skies overhead.

Her big moment is when she times to perfection her sighting of the International Space Station. The tears pour out of her as the white dot passes over her spartan wee cottage. Cosmolocalist, you might say, as well as minilopolist.

Finally, if we’re talking about technology, electronic dance music is so cleverly used on the Outrun’s soundtrack (compared to the endless orchestral bombast deployed by Coppola).

As Rona slowly mends on Orkney, we see her plowtering along beaches and rocks – but with hardcore techno from her London days pounding through her headphones.

Nature’s powers held at bay by these unnatural rhythms? Let’s just say that, by the end of the movie, it just ain’t so.

There’s another dimension in which The Outrun beats Megalopolis. The latter is subtitled “A Fable” – and I’ll give Coppola his due: he’s tried to visualise new images for this story of technological modernity (Cesar and his lover embracing on suspended girders over New Rome is all-time beautiful).

(Image: The Outrun/Studio Canal)

But The Outrun, in a stunning way, draws on fable at a much deeper level. Early on in the film, the traditional story is told of kelpies shedding skins to reveal their human shape. We hear of the pain of being frozen in that form, never to return to the water as a seal.

So Rona’s shuddering advances and reversals, the broken vodka bottles and regrettable injuries (weirdly, both her and Cesar nearly lose an eye), take place within that particular fable’s salty, indelible framing. In its closing scenes, the film ties all of this together with great delicacy.

I obviously won’t tell the details of each ending. Suffice to say that Megalopolis’s seems forced and imposed, while The Outrun truly earns its closing scenes of integration and reconciliation.

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A final thought, in a Scottish context. The Outrun is a powerful story to be sending around the world, about Scotland as a kind of healing eco-civilisation. Where modernity and the natural world, rather than the former extracting from and debasing the latter, can come to some form of synergy and mutual understanding.

Is that us? Do we Scots want that ourselves? If the world comes increasingly to our door seeking that, can we give them it?

The juddering transformations of Megalopolis may come in any case (replace Megalon with AI or biotech). To what extent can we “outrun” such futures, harnessing radical technology to regenerative ends?

So there’s your “Outrunopolis” moment. Target your local dream palace, and see if you agree.