Jonah Naplan   September 28, 2024

For all the pre-release buzz about how Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project “Megalopolis” will “change your life” or “reinvent cinema” or “break all the rules,” the biggest surprise of all is how boring the whole thing is and, ironically, how unremarkable. And yet, I wouldn’t completely discourage you from seeing it, at least on your own TV in, inevitably, a couple of weeks, despite my poor star rating, because there’s enough professional critics by now who’ve raved about the film to prove there’s probably a worthwhile conversation hidden in here somewhere about what went wrong or what went right to the point where your opinion on the movie could entirely change by the end of the discussion. It’s ridiculously dumb. But it’s also uncannily serious. A handful of the visual compositions have flavor, but most of them do not. The performances are all of variable quality, with some of the actors identifying the tone (a feat I cannot achieve; this film is thematically all over the place), and others floating around aimlessly to no end. Ultimately though, it’s the thought and the vision that matter most with this type of film, and Coppola can’t seem to nail down any one of his umpteen ideas or make us feel anything amidst this generational fumble of the bag.

But no matter how you feel about it, one thing’s for certain—“Megalopolis” can’t possibly be defined by any one genre. It’s a science-fiction epic, a drama, a tragedy, and a comedy all at once, thus echoing the work of Shakespeare in a spiritual sense, but also a literal: characters quote Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as if the words belong to them and not someone else who’s much more timeless and brilliant. It’s a choice that would seem bizarre in a “normal movie,” such as it is, but it’s one of the more ordinary ones here. I bet no critic could list to you all the strange (but rarely wonderful) tricks Coppola pulls in both the technical and narrative sides of the film because there’s so many of them and by one point or another they all just sort of merge into an incomprehensible sludge that turns the movie into more of a nightmarish fever dream than a concrete experience.

I found myself gasping for air and struggling towards the light at the end of the tunnel all throughout its chorelike runtime of 138 minutes. And yet, for all its real estate, it still doesn’t really have a plot and functions instead as a series of vaguely interconnected scenes with undefined characters who may or may not be related to one another, but we don’t really care. I’ll best try to describe it this way: Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is a visionary architect living in the futuristic New Rome (it’s basically New York City except … actually no, it’s just New York City), who dreams of building an idyllic utopia called Megalopolis from society’s best and newest technology and materials, including the invaluable Megalon (think vibranium from “Black Panther”). But he’s caught in a battle of wills with New Rome’s mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), whose daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) happens to be Cesar’s lover. Some of the movie is a frantic love story between the two of them as they spark a fire envied by Cesar’s cousin Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), the preppie son of leading power broker Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), who, himself, is getting jiggy with Cesar’s mistress named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza).

It’s hard to deny that Coppola has assembled one of the very best casts of the entire year, in terms of reputable names, a line-up that also includes Jason Schwartzman, Talia Shire, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, and Grace VanderWaal in supporting roles. It must have been difficult to convince some of these Academy Award nominated or winning actors to sign on, considering the frazzled and unreliable quality of the whole project (“Megalopolis” has been, by some stage or another, in development since the 80s, and Coppola sold his $120 million wine business to produce it; after decades, the film finally found an agreeable distributor in Lionsgate just short of four months prior to its release in most American theaters and after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival).

You’ve probably heard all sorts of rumors by now about what “Megalopolis” does in breaking the fourth wall and defying the traditional “rules” of a movie, but I’m here to tell you that your showing may not include these bits at all (mine didn’t, and don’t worry, we’re all still getting the exact same movie—hard to explain without spoiling), and if it does, then they’ll seem wholly underwhelming in their briefness as compared to how they’ve been hyped. You get the feeling throughout that “Megalopolis” so desperately wants to be a technical landmark on the map of cinema history, the same way that James Cameron’s “Avatar” is seen as a reinvention of the 3D movie, creating new VFX technology as it was being filmed, or recent movies by Christopher Nolan like “Dunkirk” and “Oppenheimer” that turned 70mm IMAX into an esteemed medium. 

But Coppola never gets anywhere useful with this dream, only a beeline for our disorientation and fatigue. A couple of moments here are so laughable that they’ll be referenced and memed upon by the online filmbro community for years to come. For all his lofty aspirations, Coppola delivers precisely the opposite effect; I was bewildered by how cheap and lazy the look of the film is, between utterly baffling uses of greenscreen and set designs that are ugly and incomprehensible in night sequences. The cinematography was done by Mihai Mălaimare Jr., whose best work here looks great as trailer material but has little thematic value as anything else. I wondered at certain points about the nature of the production and if reshoots and re-edits held it back from becoming the visual masterwork it thinks it is. But alas, this movie takes no questions.

Coppola’s primary ideas are, at their base level, components of the “We Live in a Society” mentality of films like “Joker” and “Taxi Driver,” but they don’t add anything new to the conversation, save for an admittedly important statement about how it is not the big company suits that will guide our population towards the future but the creators, the artists, the visionaries. It probably goes way too far down that proverbial road, even if you consider hyperbole an apt rhetorical tool, communicating its message in a manner as subtle as a bonk on the nose. By one point or another, “Megalopolis” incrementally becomes the equivalent of some big showdown between a kid’s action figures with dense lore stretching back for months and who has recently overheard his dad talking to a friend about conspiracy theories and politics and now wants to work that knowledge into his playtime.

I reiterate: this movie is stupid. Stupid in ways beyond the purview of this review. I don’t know that I could ever explain it, and I don’t know that I want to. I don’t know that Coppola himself even could. By this point, “Megalopolis” has become such an emblem of cinematic catastrophe that it’s more of an idea than an actual movie. Watching it, it’s hard to tell what exists ironically and what Coppola is being serious about. Should we try, if we have such integrity, to engage with the characters and story, or is it all just a gimmick with an indirect punchline? Differing parts of the movie make a case for either argument. The film is constantly jumping around and redrawing itself and rearranging facts and logistics and dynamics to the point where we don’t know what to believe and what to ignore, every scene inconsistent with the last. Its strength, if indeed “Megalopolis” has any, is not what it does to subvert our expectations but rather its commitment to the bit and willingness to run with it all the way to the end even if, ironically, the object of the bit it’s running with is that it cannot run with any one thing at a time.

Driver turns in an unintentionally hilarious performance as Cesar, delivering solemn platitudes that prove he’s taking this project deathly seriously. As the main character, we never manage to ride his wavelength and only feel connected at the immediate level of the image and the scene just because he’s fun to watch in a comic way. Esposito falls along the same unfortunate lines, given despairingly little to do except push the plot forward. Surprisingly, Voight and Plaza seem to have the best idea of the type of movie this actually is, not the type it thinks it is. But performance fares little against the big behemoth of concepts and ideas that “Megalopolis” fails to justify or make us care about. Anyone who claims they understand the movie is probably being diplomatic. It’s disappointing to see a work from the helmer of such dense narrative material as “The Godfather” trilogy release something this unfocused and bizarre and incompetent.

I can’t wait to see how “Megalopolis” will age as we look back upon the year and the decade. It will almost certainly be one of the biggest hilariocities of the current era, and a landmark of promising catastrophes, but I’d be shocked if it reveals itself as a film that we warm up to with time. It’s just too bombastic, too full of itself, and too shrouded in blather for that. You may go into “Megalopolis” expecting it to change the future, but you’ll leave wishing you never bothered.

Now playing in theaters.