Megalopolis (2024)
dir. Francis Ford Coppola
Rated: R
image: ©2024 Lionsgate
Legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola spent forty years trying to get Megalopolis, his sprawling, sci-fi epic fable about the Roman and American empires, made. Now 85, it might turn out to be the director’s last film. He waited about a decade too long for his examination of how and why empires crumble to be relevant. Maybe if he had made and released Megalopolis before Donald Trump’s infamous ride down that golden escalator, I would have praised his maximalist primal scream about our current cultural and political moment as visionary and prescient. Instead, what Megalopolis has on offer feels like a thin imitation of our nightmarish reality.
At one point during Coppola’s transfixing, raucous, utterly bonkers tale, a background actor in a political protest scene holds a sign that says “Make New Rome Great Again.” The sign holder is a follower of Clodio, who, by the film’s climax, has embraced fascist populist rhetoric in an attempt to seize power for himself. Here in the real world, one of the two candidates for President of the United States is openly fantasizing about making The Purge a reality (except only for cops). His running mate owes his entire political career (and, it seems, philosophy) to a man who believes that granting women the right to vote was a mistake that should be corrected. Pardon me if “Make New Rome Great Again” rings a tad hollow.
Megalopolis is a complete mess of a movie. It’s a wonderful, terrible, exuberant, plodding, laughable, earnest mess. Its gargantuan ambition and scale won’t be denied. Coppola had to finance the project himself – by selling off part of his successful winery empire – when he couldn’t secure backing anywhere else. The written accounts of its making evoke another of Coppola’s notoriously torturous film shoots, the one for his masterpiece Apocalypse Now. That film’s production was such a debacle that Coppola’s wife, Eleanor – who died this year at the age of 87 – turned her footage of the shoot into the acclaimed documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
If it feels like I’m avoiding getting into the plot and specifics of Megalopolis, that’s because they’re the least interesting thing about it. The story centers around Cesar Catilina, a visionary architect who has invented a revolutionary new building material he calls Megalon. This material is bio-adaptive (as far as the movie goes, that’s simply a fancy word for magic), which means it becomes part of the natural environment. It can also augment human biology. Beyond that, you have to accept that this mysterious material has the ability to solve all of humanity’s problems, if only those standing in the way would allow Cesar to apply his genius. Oh, and Cesar also possesses the ability to stop time. (Just go with it.)
The main obstacle to Cesar building a glorious new city atop the old New Rome – in this alternate-reality future United States, New Rome=New York City – is Franklyn Cicero, New Rome’s corrupt mayor. His grasp on power and arch-conservative ideology both motivate Cicero to block Cesar’s efforts at every turn.
Coppola’s script employs Shakespearean machinations to transpose the power struggles of ancient Rome’s slide from republic to dictatorship – specifically the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BCE – to a distant-future United States in the throes of the same destructive fight for dominance. Cicero’s daughter, Julia, attempts to spy on Cesar for her father, but she ends up falling in love with him, to the dismay of the mayor.
Meanwhile, Hamilton Crassus III, Ceasar’s billionaire uncle and the head of Crassus National Bank, uses his chaotic nephew Clodio to stymie Cesar’s attempts at building a new city that will work for everyone, instead of only for the rich and powerful. Caesar’s mistress, the ridiculously named Wow Platinum, is a financial news reporter (in Coppola’s vision, she is essentially a social media influencer) who lusts for money and power. She leaves Caesar to marry Crassus, but her alliances change again as soon as something better comes along. There’s also a subplot about Caesar’s dead wife and another concerning Clodio trying to use an underage sex scandal to bring Caesar down.
I would be lying if I said I gave a single, solitary damn about any of the actual nuts and bolts of the story. That’s down to Coppola’s erratic, borderline nonsensical approach to telling it. Megalopolis isn’t so much a movie as it is an endless string of sequences involving some combination of the above-mentioned characters pontificating on lofty ideals like the virtue of a free society, yelling at each other, or giving meaningful sideway glances at each other during power plays.
According to various crew members, one of the tales to come out of the production process, as reported by Variety, was that Coppola would
“often show up in the mornings before these big sequences and because no plan had been put in place, and because he wouldn’t allow his collaborators to put a plan in place, he would often just sit in his trailer for hours on end, wouldn’t talk to anybody, was often smoking marijuana … And hours and hours would go by without anything being filmed. And the crew and the cast would all stand around and wait. Then he’d come out and whip up something that didn’t make sense.”
Others mentioned that he would come up with new ideas for dialog or even whole new sequences on the spot, causing chaos and confusion. All of this shows up on screen. One of the main reasons I struggled to connect to the story was because almost every actor in Megalopolis looks completely adrift.
Coppola assembled a formidable cast for his picture, but they are no match for his pompous dialog and erratic shooting style. Half of the scenes in Megalopolis don’t so much end as they sort of peter out and surrender to what comes next. Adam Driver, as our nominal hero Caesar, does his best with what he’s given, but even he – who excelled in an equally (but more successfully) bonkers role in 2021’s Annette – struggles to make Coppola’s dialog sing.
The great Giancarlo Esposito delivers a believable villain’s turn as Mayor Cicero. Nathalie Emmanuel, who had her breakout role as Missandei on Game of Thrones, is luminous as Cicero’s daughter Julia, who betrays her clan for the love of Caesar. Aubrey Plaza, as Wow Platinum, and Shia LaBeouf, as the unstable Clodio, inject a chaotic element into the film, but their graphic sex scene together was a snooze. It felt very much like an 85-year-old-man’s idea of being sexually transgressive. (I will admit that the gender-bending costume LaBeouf wears for an extended portion of the movie became an instant aspirational Halloween costume for yours truly.)
The rest of the cast is stacked with greats who barely do anything. Laurence Fishburne (who, at 17, worked with Coppola on Apocolypse Now), Jason Schwartzman (Coppola’s nephew), Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, and Coppola’s sister, Talia Shire, are all present and accounted for, but each one barely registers on screen because of the chaos.
Jon Voight – I’m very curious to know what kind of movie the ultra-MAGA Trump supporter thought he was making here – shows up every other scene or so to drunkenly mumble his lines to whichever actor is closest to him in any given scene.
Surrounding the actors is a bonkers aesthetic made up of CGI/greenscreen backgrounds that look at least twenty years out of date. Multiple times throughout my screening of Megalopolis, I was put in mind of George Lucas’s empty and hollow digital backdrops and soulless CGI in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
Coppola certainly seems like a director who has lost his fastball as far as determining the best uses of CGI technology. One on-set story from Megalopolis involves Coppola burning through a whole day of shooting in order to project an image onto Adam Driver’s face, when the same effect apparently could have been achieved with CGI in an hour or so of set time.
Then there are the stories about the unwanted touching. During one sequence described as a Studio 54-esque dance club sequence, several extras – exclusively women and several of whom were scantily clad or topless – were, according to them, forcibly kissed and hugged by Coppola during shooting. He also allegedly pulled a few women close to him so that they would sit on his lap. Coppola claimed this was all in an effort to get the ladies “in the mood.”
That anecdote doesn’t have anything to do with the content of Megalopolis, unless you consider the fact that it’s baked into the film through the DNA of its maker. In the end, that’s the ultimate problem with the movie. Coppola is a rich old white man telling the story of a rich young white man saving the day. Caesar is our hero, but he’s one born of a poverty of imagination where only a certain type of hero should be heeded. It’s through no coincidence that this kind of hero looks and sounds like the best version the director could imagine of himself.
Caesar is essentially Elon Musk. He’s a self-proclaimed genius whose talent should never be scrutinized. In Megalopolis, that makes Caesar altruistic and benevolent. In the real world – where the only kind of hero that rich old white men can imagine is one like them; one who can right everything through sheer talent and intellect – that kind of hero often turns out to be an unimaginable villain.
Why it got 2.5 stars:
- I admire the ambition and scale of Megalopolis, but the execution is its fatal flaw. In the end, it’s a lot of sound and fury that doesn’t signify very much other than a vanity project.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- In case you need more examples of how batshit insane this shoot must have been: When Coppola arrived in Georgia, he was unable to find accommodations to his liking — so he bought a roadside motel and had it completely remodeled while he was working on the movie.
- Speaking of Georgia, Coppola choosing to shoot there is indicative of the larger problem I have with the movie. Megalopolis’s defenders no doubt make the case that Coppola is advocating for a way forward where everyone in society is valued (hard to square that with the final image of the film, but I digress). Yet this titan of enlightened thinking chose to do business with a state that has legislated making women broodmares for the state through their sick 6-week abortion ban. Those tax credits are pretty sweet, though. Please never forget, especially when it comes to rich and powerful people: money talks, bullshit walks.
- I absolutely love Coppola’s updated American Zoetrope logo.
- Ditto the iris-ins and -outs that Coppola infuses into the movie. Like with Dracula, he delights in incorporating techniques from earlier film eras.
- I get that the hair and makeup department was going for Caesar haircuts because of the Roman Empire connection, but dear lord they all look delightfully goofy. I loved them.
- I laughed heartily each time an elected official (usually the mayor) was in public and was lustily booed by the crowd. I feel like we’re a step or two away from that in real life.
- Did anyone else out there have real issues with the sound mix, or was it only my screening? The music and dialog were competing throughout most of the movie, to the point where I had trouble catching the dialog in places.
- Each protester sequence feels lifeless and completely inert.
- I think this might have been a massive hit if it had been released when we were collectively having the conversation about how often men think about the Roman Empire.
- Lest anyone accuse me of dogpiling on FFC (hey, look, we share initials!) too much: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He made those first four all within seven years of each other. Francis Ford Coppola is one of the G.O.A.T.s!
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- This was a late Friday afternoon screening at Alamo Drafthouse Cedars. It was me, Rae, and two other people. As the credits began to roll, one of our fellow audience members turned to his companion and very slowly, with a gravely delivery, said, “Where’s my 24 dollars?!?” I’m guessing he picked up the tab for both tickets. Megalopolis was in wide theatrical release before it completely bombed, so it might be a little harder to find now, but it is currently available in theaters.