Movie Review – ‘Megalopolis’ – I’m not mad, Coppola, I’m just disappointed

While I’ve no doubt this was a treat for Coppola nerds all over the world, an early screening of Megalopolis was livecast to 65+ theaters prior to the wide-release on September 27, beginning with a conversation with director Francis Ford Coppola. Moderated by New York Film Festival Chair and Artistic Director, Dennis Lim, if we’re all being honest, it was a conversation that should have been recorded (and heavily edited) for a podcast to be enjoyed at another time. With Coppola, and special guests Robert De Niro and Spike Lee, it was forty minutes of misremembered beginnings, inside jokes, and De Niro looking forward to a colonoscopy. There were twenty-five minutes of “How did you meet Coppola?” (that obviously none of the panelists actually remembered), how Megalopolis was financed (a completely relatable yarn about leveraging his stake in a wine company), and if you dozed off you could pretend that Robert DeNiro was actually Tony Bennett. That maybe was only me.

When it came to the final question, as the Q&A slogged over the allotted time – are you optimistic about the future of cinema – Coppola wants everyone to get along. He’ll work with anyone and that makes him happy. De Niro said he was worried about the future and then went onto encourage everyone to get out to beat Trump so we wouldn’t turn into the characters in Megalopolis. He did go on to say that Trump couldn’t do anything with structure and could not have made this movie. It was the most he’d said in forty minutes.

It’s worth noting that neither Spike Lee nor Robert De Niro appears in Megalopolis. Little did the audience know this meandering conversation with little moderation was exactly how the next 138 minutes would go.

Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) is an artistic dreamer and head of the Design Authority who has a vision to build a world where everyone is happy and content and free to frolic and make more dreams. Cesar isn’t a God but he can stop time, and what he used it for previously isn’t clear but it’s a neat party trick no one knows about. It’s also a MacGuffin because it serves no purpose to the plot.

You know what – forget I said anything about him stopping time.

Standing against him is Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) of New Rome, who once prosecuted Cesar for the disappearance and maybe murder of his wife. Cesar’s ex-love interest is Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a popular TV personality who finds money and power sexy but she’ll never be enough of an intellectual for Cesar. Also not a fan is his cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), who hates him for his ambition, his ideas, and his good looks. Defecting from the constant disapproval of her father is Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), former party girl and potential Thinker who may match Cesar’s vision and compassion. Together Cesar and Julia work to bring New Rome forward, but petty adversarial vices work in ever-decreasing circles of malice and jealousy, threatening to destroy any hope humanity has of living in the future.

I think.

If you’re looking for a basic tl;dr – bureaucracy threatens the creative minds of the world and if everyone could really all just get along everything would be super cool and chill, but people suck.

Megapolis, as presented by its ambitious director, Francis Ford Coppola, is an absolute mess masquerading as a lofty big-screen epic. There are plenty of great germs of seeds of ideas that if allowed to grow organically and flow to their natural conclusions would have made several fine movies. However, no one had the balls to tell Coppola that the script he was bent on filming with his own money was a haphazard tangle of half-plots and the constantly shifting mist of storylines was largely incomprehensible.

As seen with Twixt (2011) Coppola has a very difficult time with the idea of lowercase ‘G’ genre, that is to say, any genre that isn’t Drama. He’s the grandfather of every film student who intellectually understands the idea of “Horror” or “Fantasy” or “Magical Realism” and thinks to themselves as a laugh, “How hard could it be?”

Two hours and eighteen minutes later, we can see that it was absolutely a lot harder than he anticipated. A magical building material created from death and loss? A future-forward city that one can only see with eyes closed? Vestal virgin popstars?

In this economy?

Aside from stunning visuals clearly built on fever dreams and maybe Class B drugs we commoners don’t have access to, Megalopolis is incomplete and all over the place. Blending Roman mythology, social media influencers, and Shakespeare, results in a muddy mélange of monologues that pad the run time and subliminally plants the phrase “For Your Consideration” across the bottom of the screen. Snappy camera work and hallucinatory sequences do less to further the plot and dissolve into half-imagined rants about celebrity, politics, ambition, and creative drive.

This is not to say that Driver, Emmanuel, LaBeouf, and Plaza don’t make a serious effort to make this very colorful spool of imaginative yarn barf appear cohesive. These are seasoned, accomplished actors working towards their strengths and looking beautiful while doing it, but the dialogue is community-theater clunky and there are a few terrifying moments I thought the cast would break into song. Dramatic moments are unintentionally funny and there are herculean leaps in time and logic. As the credits roll, you may discover you didn’t hate it, but you couldn’t tell anyone what about Megalopolis you liked.

Maybe this movie is solely for Coppola completists and there will be college courses dissecting Megalopolis frame by frame.  Good for them. This movie isn’t for your average movie fan looking for another Babylon (2022)-style Hollywood epic to artfully fill a few entertaining hours. We all want to say we saw a theatrical release that went on to define a director’s career.

Coppola had better hope Megalopolis doesn’t define his long and spectacular career. His legacy doesn’t deserve that.

But to be fair, we don’t deserve Megalopolis.

Megalopolis (2024) is rated R for swears, drugs, booze, sexytimes, gunshots, arrow shots, murder, suicidal ideation, maternal nagging, paternal disapproval, and LaBeouf looking rather hot in a dress.