Megalopolis (2024)
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Screenwriter: Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne
It isn’t often that a director gets an opportunity to release a large-scale passion project, especially in the current state of the film industry. For fans of cinema, there’s joy to be found simply in the circumstance, and especially so when its a legend in the medium.
And then there’s the crushing disappointment when it fails to live up to the lofty expectations it inevitably sets for itself.
Megalopolis is a failure. It has been a project in the works since the 1980s – an anticipated work for those in the know – and a supposed magnum opus for one of the great directors of the post-Studio System New Hollywood.
What we have is a vanity project meant to make a grand statement about society that doesn’t move beyond the musings of a high philosophy undergraduate. Slapping the word “fable” on a title can’t cover over trite lines, poorly drawn characters, and a stuttering story. It’s downright unenjoyable, yet not bad enough to arouse hatred.
The film follows Adam Driver’s Cesar Catalina, a brilliant architect and scientist determined to create a better future for humanity using the super material “megalon”, which he wants to use to construct Megalopolis. Megalopolis is to be a neighborhood in New Rome built on the idea of interconnectedness, eventually becoming a city-wide utopia. He faces opposition from the Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), his cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), and Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), each of whom want to maintain the status quo and their personal grips on power. He’s aided by Cicero’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), whom he awakens from a socialite lifestyle early on in the film.
The main problem with Megalopolis is that the philosophy feels half-baked. It’s a collection of ideas, lines, and sequences that don’t build to anything.
The film’s introduction leaves a terrible first impression. Where The Godfather opens with a character monologue accompanied by a timed zoom lens pulling back to reveal Don Vito, Megalopolis opens with text on a building being read to the audience, followed by a series of unspectacular scenes with some Star Wars Prequel-level acting. There’s an unveiling of ideas for the demolished sector of New Rome, Clodio is jumping around in a manic fit, Wow sings into a camera, and Cesar quotes “Hamlet” – meanwhile, interlopers make random comments to help signify the story’s alliances. It showcases the film’s worst sound mixing, where the music and crowd mutterings are shoved so far into the background that it creates an eerie lack of immersion more akin to a rehearsal than final presentation. Julia later goes to Cesar’s apartment, where her delivery is so stilted that the two don’t seem to be in the same room.
The overall thesis isn’t focused enough to have any real meaning. Cesar wants to build a utopia to the end of making society better, but there’s no interrogation of what that even means because the film can’t conceive anything beyond “Cesar winning = good society”. He has visions and ideas that he spouts, but they are so incoherent that you might as well be watching the Love Has Won cult with higher production values. By the end of this film, the only clear thing is that the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad, and what makes the bad guys bad are their attempts to hinder the good guys.
A more pointed story would at least give the film a sense of momentum, and while the thrust is getting Megalopolis built, there’s no exploration of how that gets done other than Cesar thinking about it. Coppola likely wanted to demonstrate how artists and visionaries push humanity into the future, but the film never actually shows that because things happen without sufficient explanation or exploration. Suddenly, after many scenes of Cesar going through montages and barely relevant interactions, he has this “world of the future” exhibit where he also apparently lives. It’s jarring, and not in a clever way that conforms to Cesar’s rantings about interwoven time. Instead, it’s just kind of there.
One device that does work well in concert with those ideas are the triptych montages. They’re engrossing visually and audibly, and bring strong contrast to early scenes that are noteworthy for their simplified set-up and sound mix. It also plays into the mystique of a visionary filmmaker trying to make a movie in a different way, but they feel like they were developed halfway through the filmmaking process because they aren’t consistently integrated.
On another positive front are the performances of Adam Driver, Shia LaBeouf, and Aubrey Plaza. Adam Driver is magnetic throughout the film, particularly because he’s able to convincingly express this pretentious, flat character in every moment. He pulls nonsense out of thin air and delivers it with ease. The ability to embody such an insufferable, boring character is impressive. LaBeouf and Plaza got the fun end of the script. Their characters aren’t more dimensional, but they at least have roles that allow them to have energy. Shia LaBeouf gets to be a Joker-like Trumpian figure that exudes dark charisma in each scene he inhabits, and there are few that can do that like him. Aubrey Plaza has her own sense of deviousness that is equally captivating. The two share a shocking scene that, while gross, is performed pristinely, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else pulling it off.
But that’s where the positives run dry for Megalopolis. And there’s an irony to that. This is supposed to be Coppola’s own Megalopolis, the shining beacon of the triumph of the visionary. Instead, it’s a complete mess that fails to live up to its own promises of excellence. Artists and philosophers should be looked to by society as we forge a path into the future, but Francis Ford Coppola is not among those figures. Megalopolis is all showmanship with no substance underneath, and his best days as an artist are clearly behind him.
Score: 8/24
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