'Megalopolis' Is a Magnificent Fiasco

You've never seen a movie like Francis Ford Coppola's baffling passion project.

[Spoilers ahead for Megalopolis]

Even if you never see Megalopolis, you’ve probably picked up by now that it’s Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project. He has worked on this sci-fi epic since 1982, and he finally decided to leverage his own wealth (via his successful winery) to make it a reality. As I said earlier this year, even if the film is a critical and commercial flop (and it turned out to be both), Coppola can still count it as a victory because the film now exists. It’s his money, and he’s free to do with it what he wants, even if the result is a movie as misguided and disastrous as Megalopolis.

I don’t want to just start lobbing jabs at Megalopolis. There are plenty of reviews that do that, and if you want to dismiss the whole project, that’s your business. Instead, I think underneath every nonsensical plot development and every terrible artistic choice is a theme of running out of time. I can’t give you a plot synopsis because the movie seems to switch to a new central conflict every 20 minutes or so, but there’s an overarching conceit of the main character, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), an architect who can stop time. There’s the notion that only art (and therefore an artist like Cesar) can stop time. Coppola, now 85 and working on a project he started in his 40s, probably feels the weight of his years. He likely knows this is his last movie (he says he’s already working on another, but in this marketplace, I don’t know who’s going to back him), and even if it isn’t, he knows there’s far more life behind him than ahead of him. If you’ve already achieved immortality with movies like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, what’s left? The clock is still ticking.

However, that’s not the only idea in Megalopolis, a movie that contains decades worths of ideas with no guiding principles, characters, or story. Here’s an example:

The movie is set in “New Rome,” which is basically New York (and clearly shot in Atlanta, but I’ll take the hometown sights like the Fox Theater) with a Roman Empire sheen (think a less-defined version of NBC’s short-lived series Kings). During a show at the Colisseum/Madison Square Garden, there’s a performance by Vesta (Grace VanderWaal), a virginal pop star (like the Vestal Virgin; nothing in Megalopolis is subtle). During the performance, one of the movie’s villains, Cesar’s cousin Clodio Pulcher (Shia LeBeouf), runs doctored footage of Cesar and Vesta having sex to create a scandal. Cesar’s love-interest, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), quickly discovers that the footage is false, reveals the truth, and nothing of consequence happens except Vesta does a brief heel turn a la Taylor Swift’s 2017 album Reputation. She is never in the movie again.

Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina in Megalopolis | Image via Lionsgate