Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Writer: Francis Ford Coppola

Stars: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight

Running Time: 138 minutes

Please note there may be spoilers below

I obviously don’t prejudge a movie before I’ve seen it, but Francis Ford Coppola is a man that tests my resolve. Reading about the production journey of Megalopolis is a bit like reading about a bruised political campaign. There’s been the sexual misconduct allegations against Coppola himself, a recalled trailer released with fabricated critic quotes, the hiring and firing of his visual effects team, and his controversial casting choices – including Jon Voight, Shia LaBeouf, and Dustin Hoffman – which he claimed were chosen to make the film less ‘woke.’ I assume they also came at a significant discount.

Coppola has always greatly romanticized his artistic potential – if only he was out of the beady eyes of the Studio System, if only he didn’t have to justify his choices to bean-counting executives, if only he was just left alone to render his art with little financial constraints, then at that point he would truly make his masterpiece. It’s just a shame his greatest art (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) was made under great duress, under war-like Studio vs Artist conditions. With Megalopolis, he’s trying to prove his thesis. Funded with $120 million of his own fortune, this is the moment Coppola has been speaking of for over 40 years. This is the result of his artistic freedom.

I first read about Megalopolis 24 years ago. To finally see it caused a rumble of high anticipation in me. Maybe it could work. Maybe for all the bad press, the divisive festival reviews, the highly disagreeable casting choices, maybe Coppola had a point – who doesn’t want to support one man struggling for art made against a repressive system? But then the movie started. The first clue is in the subtitle. Originally called Megalopolis, the film was re-titled Megalopolis: A Fable, which is indicative to the type of pretension you’re in for. The story requires a deep breath before being described – it’s a re-imagination of history, its design and costumes an awkward blend of modern and ancient. It’s set in New York, or rather a fantasy of it. It constantly hearkens back to Roman roots, scenes filled with togas, head wreaths, and even a coliseum.

We get a series of disparate, philosophizing scenes tied loosely together with very expensive string. It’s about corruptible power, the building of a city, about supernaturally controlling time. If that sounds fascinating, I can assure you the film works very hard to extinguish all excitement. Adam Driver is Cesar Catilina, an architect who has won the Nobel Prize for inventing a building material called Megalon. It seems to be a material that’s part alive, capable of building organic structures, all of them rendered in the hazy mush of late 90’s CGI. Cesar is also an alcoholic and a drug addict. Oh, and his wife mysteriously disappeared. Oh, and he was also prosecuted for her murder. When your character is about many things, they’re about nothing.

Part of Cesar references the real urban planner Robert Moses, but not the interesting parts. It’s a testament to Adam Driver’s infinite watch-ability that he manages to retain some dignity amongst the dramatic inertia. At a certain point I realized this is the kind of film you make when you’re trying to condense 40+ years of ideas into a single feature. Coppola has read the books that inspired him, but at some point he read too many. Just one of his many literary and historical references therein would be enough, but this is a movie made of many floating thoughts, all of them weightless and moving off screen like the clouds above Cesar’s skyscrapers.

Even with this spaghetti writing, Coppola inspired extensive improvisation on set. Sex scenes, drug scenes, dialogue scenes all have the messy, unfocused miasma of a very expensive student film, aimless and desperately searching for concrete drama between the platitudes. It’s not subtle either. The always likeable Aubrey Plaza plays a TV presenter who desires vasts amounts of money. Her name? Wow Platinum. It’s nice to know if you loose focus, we have names like Wow Platinum to keep us on track.

One of it’s worst crimes is it’s visual ugliness. If I demand anything from an expensive passion project, it’s aesthetics. Between the poor green-screen compositing, the toga-party costumes and the oven baked color pallet, the feeling is one of arty tricks that do little to convince you of substance. In one early scene, our group of power hungry characters watch the demolition of a building, a building that looks so detached and post-produced, it’s an insult they couldn’t even add smoke in the foreground to convince you the explosion is believable.

The last and fatal crime is a lack of humor. Even in the most absurd and poorly rendered ideas, the humility of good humor can do a lot of heavy lifting. The tone remains knock-off tragic Shakespeare, like Hamlet getting drunk and improvising a monologue about tax revenue. Megalopolis is a story about building cities that does no world-building of it’s own, no commitment to it’s own reality. It’s entirely unclear how anything is made, how time can stop, what Cesar actually does in his office all day, how people are affected by the environment around them. It’s feels so strange to just watch characters discuss events like empty vessels of flesh and pomp. It’s feels like a movie written by androids, who have all the knowledge in the world but no way of emotionally connecting it to a real human.

In desperate need of reprieve, the movie gave me a sliver of hope. A soviet satellite was due to crash into the city. Characters spoke of it with anticipation, which by all accounts, sounds like the kind of visual spectacle a film this flat could do with. I rubbed my hands and briefly forgave myself for expressing the need for such a shallow glimmer of excitement – maybe before the next calcified dialogue scene, there’ll be an explosion! Alas, the fire of the satellite tore through the sky like a devil’s comet, heading down and down into the city of buildings and shadowy figures below. The impact was inevitable and undoubtedly should be formidable. Then before the big moment, before the city was due to be swallowed up in flame and spectacle, the film cut to black and the next calcified dialogue scene began. Then I knew there was no hope. Even ankle-deep pleasures aren’t allowed in here.