Megalopolis
LIONSGATE
No one can ‘rate’ or ‘classify’ Francis Ford Coppola’s latest venture into madness, Megalopolis, in a purely objective way. If someone says that the film is a 0 out of 5 stars or even a 5 out of 5 stars, they are most definitely lying. Why is that? Simply because Megalopolis exists on a different plane far beyond the confines of what one would consider to be ‘traditional’ cinema, meaning a straightforward picture operating within the failed ‘three-act’ structure that has tarnished our movies and media literacy. Instead, this overambitious, ‘unreleasable’ project should be viewed as an oddly fascinating performance art piece so compellingly awful it absolutely needs to be seen to be believed, attempting to depict the Catalinarian conspiracy within a contemporary, post-truth setting.
This is exacerbated through a ‘theatrical’ fourth wall break, where a live performer (in our screening’s case, a studio publicist. No joke!) asks a question to Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) during a press conference after the Republic of New Rome falls. The lights are turned back on in the cinema in a fit of bewilderment. As a result, the audience is now a ‘part’ of the movie – they are extras inside the press room observing a living human being, playing a journalist, interacting with the IMAX screen, and inquiring to Cesar about society’s doomed future. It doesn’t add much to the theatrical experience, other than an out-of-body-moment where people look at each other and awkwardly laugh at what’s going on, having never experienced something like this occurs in the confines of mainstream entertainment (Lionsgate agreed to distribute this, after all).
However, it also indicates Coppola’s new perception of what cinema should aspire to be in its current state. It should no longer be a series of moving images designed to entertain but entirely become a living, breathing entity that communicates with the past and the future. Cinema is forced to evolve in form to continue preserving its place within art because cinema is an art form, and most filmmakers have sadly lost that ideal. It’s not entirely their fault when studio executives solely think about film as a commodity designed to sell tickets or brand it as ‘content.’ There’s nothing duller in this economy than watching a ‘piece of content’ made by someone who’s essentially a journeyman and kowtows to the demands of billionaires who have no idea what art is or express innate feelings that should be conveyed in a visual/aural medium, thus removing the soul and urgency that makes any masterpiece stand the test of time.
No one is allowed to take any risk in Hollywood anymore because the only thing anyone thinks about is profitability. Of course, the name of the game is to make money. However, this ensures no one is allowed to experiment with cinema at a non-independent level, making Megalopolis such a tantalizing project. In fact, no major studio wanted to finance Coppola’s lifelong dream, declaring it far too riskier of a movie not only to make but release in front of an audience who have been handheld by studios for far too long.
Coppola had to sell part of his winery to make it on his own terms, amounting to a $120 million production that allegedly went through multiple setbacks and on-set controversies. The 85-year-old filmmaker has denied these allegations and even sued Variety for libel after a story was published that revealed him (by way of a video) kissing extras without their consent. Whether this is true or not does not change the fact that Coppola himself is a terrible human being, even if he has been exonerated by the masses for having changed the collective imagination’s perception of cinema with the arrival of The Conversation, The Godfather, and Apocalypse Now.
Financing convicted pedophile Victor Salva’s projects after he went to jail makes him incredibly problematic, amongst the numerous other widely publicized aspects of his abusive, almost dehumanizing directorial methods (for more information on this, see the late Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which was co-directed by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper), and public comments he made over the years. But there was no world in which this critic would not see Megalopolis, even after Coppola cast Shia LaBeouf and Jon Voight in his picture. Such a production like the one the world now has on its hands never gets made in an insecure moviegoing society with no idea how to make art anymore. Just for its sheer ambition, the movie should be worth seeing, especially in a time where audiences will lap anything up that jangles keys at their face with little to no meaning or artistic flair but will reject something that makes them think because it doesn’t have a ‘three-act’ structure or a clearer-than-clear point.
Martin Scorsese famously said, “Movies don’t have acts,” and Coppola hammers that point home in Megalopolis, a movie with no discernible structure, pace, or points of reference to draw from. Of course, the use of rear projections for its driving (and elevator) sequences is not done in any movie anymore, but it was a frequent technique back in the early days of cinema. But how they are used feels revolutionary, a constant push-pull between the past (what cinema was like), the present (what cinema is today), and the future (what cinema should aspire to be). It reminds audiences how artists used to create while blending it with newer, more elaborated computer-generated technologies to make Coppola’s Roman Epic decidedly modern.
But he frequently cites cineasts like Georges Méliès, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, F.W. Murnau, and Orson Welles, with even late-stage Jean-Luc Godard with early-day Wachowski sensibilities, with the visual ambitions of a George Lucas making Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. There are no specific points of reference to draw from, and anyone with cinematic baggage will bring their own knowledge to a particular technique Coppola employs in the movie or a shot that will automatically remind them of an idea a filmmaker introduced that revolutionized cinema history.
Some have also compared the film to a $120 million version of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, which could be correct. From a purely scenaristic level, the movie has a shell of a story, related to Cesar wanting to build his Megalopolis in the wake of an accident that has destroyed the foundations of New Rome, while its ultra-conservative mayor Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) vehemently opposes the Design Authority’s utopic project. He also has obtained information, by way of fixer Nush Berman (Dustin Hoffman), on Cesar’s culpability related to his wife’s death. However, Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), Franklin’s daughter, begins to fall in love with Cesar’s ambitious, tormented soul, and vows to help him build this utopic society the way he envisions so. Meanwhile, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), Cesar’s cousin, is also madly in love with Julia, and plans to bring his Empire down through the help of journalist Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), who has recently married bank mogul Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), and is secretly liquidating all of his finances behind his back.
As one can tell, it’s all over the place, and most of the plot threads introduced as essential in the movie are quickly resolved by the next scene or never mentioned again. In one scene, Cesar’s time-stopping abilities disappear, leading him to great torment in his quest to build his visionary Megalopolis. That gets rapidly settled when Julia tells Cesar to do it for her. In another scene, a riot builds out as Clodio ramps up a mob to storm City Hall and destroy Cesar’s operation in the process. That doesn’t become important after Hamilton quickly uncovers Clodio’s (and Wow’s) scheme to liquidate his finances. Throughout its 138 minutes, Coppola has no idea what it wants to say, whether on society moving on from its unsustainable way of living, or in its on-the-nose, timely political commentary. Scratch that: he may know exactly what he wants to say. But one would have to be blazed out of their minds to understand how he now sees the world.
Elongated bits of high-spirited drama bring us closer into Cesar’s mind, and the overarching story is divided through PowerPoint 2007 slides. However, there’s a constant battle between what the movie’s story should achieve and what its thematic underpinnings should convey. Should it tell a story or rely more on the atmosphere and heightened reality setting than anything else? Coppola doesn’t seem to know, but one thing he has done well in all of his films is how immersive his worlds feel by letting the character constantly pop in and out of his frames and make the audience perceive only bits of conversation. This is incredibly evident in The Godfather’s wedding scene, and the same can absolutely be said for its repurposed setting within Wow and Hamilton’s wedding in Megalopolis.
There’s no story, here. Just vibes. From the chariot races, the Gladiator battle to a performance from Grace VanderWaal, a Nam June Paik-esque drug trip culminating in a sex tape revelation. It’s all meant to make us observe how the characters live in this alternate future and how their lives are constantly struggling with “the now” and the “forever.” Coppola presents these through visual metaphors but also draws characters that feel eerily close to people who have recently been embroiled in one embarrassing scandal after the next.
There’s no doubt Wow Platinum is Olivia Nuzzi (a “journalist” having an affair with an older, wealthier man? Come on!), while Franklin Cicero is a parallel to Eric Adams, a mayor who has abused his power far too often to benefit his own pockets (and the fact that it’s set in a fictionalized New York heightens this). With Megalopolis being shot in 2022, and now just releasing in the wake of Nuzzi’s RFK scandal, and Adams being indicted for wire fraud, Coppola proves its trailer quote that he “has always been ahead” whenever he makes – and eventually releases – a film.
But with every strong image (cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr. does create some incredibly jaw-dropping IMAX photography in many sequences that have not been realized on this scale since the 1920s) and potent mediation on societal collapse and the political ramifications of two opposing visions that do not serve “the people,” there are five inexplicably terrible sequences that defy all sense of logic and leaves us agape in unintentional laugher. One that had the most vivid reactions occurs near the end of the film, where Coppola stages Academy-Award winner Jon Voight, bedridden, pretending to have an erection, and says, “What do ya think of this boner I’ve got?” He then reveals a concealed bow and arrow and kills someone. No subtext here, just pure silliness that does not work at all.
Or how about when Wow Platinum says, “God, you’re so anal,” to Ceasar, and then, “I happen to be very oral”? It’s so indescribably off-kilter that the audience will either be on the film’s wavelength or be vehemently opposed to what it’s showing and, in this case, saying. It’s set in an alternate reality, but one seemingly elevated by baroque aesthetic tendencies, whether in its expressionist photography or otherworldly acting performances from a cast of characters who never interact like normal human beings do. Whether this is intentional or not does not matter because the end result is the funniest possible outcome.
An individual appreciation of Megalopolis will essentially boil down to a scene which occurs in its first ten minutes. Cesar appears at a Cicero press conference, initially cloaked and kneeling, and suddenly blurts out a Shakespeare soliloquy. From there, he discusses how the city should adopt the substance he discovered called Megalon, while Dustin Hoffman’s Nush replies, “We need CONCRETE! CONCRETE! CONCRETE! And STEEL! STEEL! STEEL!” Every line reading from its respective actors belongs on a different planet. No one is on the same page because no one talks, walks, and breathes the same. People will randomly tap-dance, sand-walk, or fall down, while others will begin singing or pronouncing their lines with a bizarre accent. It all feels decidedly kitsch, particularly in a scene where Julia walks into Cesar’s Megalopolis for the first time, and the visual effects on display are worthy of Neil Breen’s Cade: The Tortured Crossing.
How on earth did this cost $120 million? Because the money is certainly not on the screen, especially when Coppola envisions his Megalopolis, and it looks like the “Society if…” meme with little to no meat around the bone of his vision. It’s so chintzy one does wonder if most of the money was spent on sex and drugs, because the bulk of Megalopolis occurs “in the cluuuuuuuuubbbbb” where Cesar, Julia, Clodio, and Wow partake in copious amounts of illegal substances that are visually represented with the fervor of someone who smokes weed 24 hours a day and seven days a week.
In that case, one could say Megalopolis is essentially Neil Breen’s Caligula, with a visual style that’s decidedly ambitious and far too galaxy-brained to be fully displayed on the IMAX screen (or perhaps technology is not as advanced as Coppola wants to for his Megalopolis to be shown the way he wants to). At the same time, his dialogue-heavy scenes feel too out there for any humans to attach themselves to Cesar’s plight of a perfect utopia versus a more conservative ideal of what society should achieve. These notions don’t coalesce into a perfect whole, let alone a decent one, especially when sex and bacchanalia fill up most of the runtime (hence the Caligula comparison), but there’s no denying it should be witnessed at least once in your life.
No words could ever describe the gesture Coppola makes with Megalopolis (though it’s undoubtedly not poetic), and no review could ever be attuned to what his thesis statement (haphazardly) makes because Megalopolis isn’t a film. People are reviewing or analyzing Coppola’s new project as a straightforward movie when it breaks all conception of what cinema currently is, whether inside New Rome’s diegesis, or outside when the audience becomes inadvertently part of the picture. Coppola has very few solutions for what society should aspire to become. Perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps it’s not at all what he sought out to do. Perhaps one needs to get blazed to grasp an iota of what Coppola ultimately wants to say. It doesn’t matter. Megalopolis is here. It’s bound to flop, but Coppola has already won. He released it to the world, and people are talking about it, which is something that was once thought impossible.
Don’t let the now destroy the forever because Megalopolis is poised to stand the test of time, for better or worse.