In the stuffy mists of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, our protagonist and architect Caesar Catalina (Adam Driver) asks his soon-to-be love interest Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel) why she came to see him if not for laughs. Watching, I couldn’t help but ask myself the same thing. Had I come to see the film out of schadenfreude or to revel in the beautiful disaster it was purported to be? Had I come in a facile hope I could enjoy it in a way others couldn’t? In truth, I was intrigued, excited, and even salivating to watch a mad folly from one of history’s greatest filmmakers. The film had gestated in Coppola’s mind for over 40 years, and, unable to secure funding, he eventually financed it himself with $120 million from the sale of his vineyard. Megalopolis promised an unfiltered look into the febrile imagination of a visionary director. The opportunity to witness the brush strokes of a singular artist unfettered from the studio system and painting on a canvas of his choosing. It promised if nothing else to be a bold, beautiful, ambitious swing for the fences. However, it is none of these things. Megalopolis is a dull, turgid, meandering, self-important mess.
The film follows Catalina as he attempts to rebuild New Rome as Megalopolis using a self-invented magical material called Megalon (which I believe vindicates Avatar’s unobtanium after all these years). Megalopolis is his vision of a new utopian society which looks more like the bizarre vanity project of some oil-rich Middle Eastern state. However, to build it he must overcome the opposition of New Rome’s Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and its intransigent political and economic system. Coppola, however, gets bored with this very quickly and veers off into bizarre side plots involving a falling Soviet Satellite, a pop star Vestal Virgin sporting an invisible cloak, Shia La Boeuf in drag, deepfake pornography, Jon Voight disguising a crossbow as his erection, and an assassination attempt copied from the life of medieval priest Thomas Becket. Bizarre is also too kind a word for these plot threads as it implies they might be interesting when Coppola has instead accomplished a feat in making them so uncompelling.
The film tantalises an exploration of the power and limits of the American Empire through the lens of Roman hedonism, excess, and intrigue. However, it never delivers this as Megalopolis’ neo-Roman design functions as nothing more than loose-fitting garb to allow for a Vegas redesign of Madison Square Gardens into a Colosseum, a plethora of pig-Latin character names, and some truly gaudy costumes. The film holds very little visual interest as it oscillates between horrendous CGI landscapes and dreary shots of ordinary New York. If you want to see a story of political power plays and internecine warfare set against an avant-garde Roman Empire, watch Caligula: The Ultimate Cut. It is a million times more fun and, despite being 40 minutes longer, feels a million times shorter.
I am sure Megalopolis will invite spirited defences as an example of true auteur filmmaking and a rejection of the mainstream, which celebrates organic human connection through its fluid urban concepts. However, Megalopolis is simply uninteresting, flimsy, and drowning in pomposity. In being freed from economic imperatives, Coppola has become burdened by his own portent. If it is true that The Godfather insists upon itself, as Family Guy argued, then this really really really insists upon itself. It insists upon itself so much that Caesar is given the power to control time for no reason other than to freeze the frame and point out the film’s importance.
The cast, which also includes Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman (very briefly), and Jason Schwartzman, are like an annoying bunch of theatre kids who have been let off the leash as they grandstand and monologue ad nauseam. At one point, we are even forced to sit through Driver delivering Hamlet’s soliloquy in its painful entirety. Only Aubrey Plaza gets away unscathed by hamming up her performance as Wow Platinum (that’s honestly her name), a BDSM finance reporter who marks a cross between Jim Cramer and a dominatrix.
There is nothing that Megalopolis says or does that is worth enduring its length. It has nothing profound to say about humanity or the state of America that cannot be found better articulated elsewhere. It is also sadly not an example of a filmmaker flexing his directing muscles for one last time, as much as it is a filmmaker doddering through his own uninteresting playground. It is not worth your or anyone else’s time.