‘Megalopolis:’ A Visually Stunning, Stunningly Misconceived Coppola Epic

It pains me to say that Francis Ford Coppola’s return to cinema, Megalopolis, is not a good film.

It is, in my opinion, such a stunningly ill-conceived film from one of our greatest filmmakers that I find it impossible to weigh on a “good” or “bad” scale. It offers over two hours of incredibly inventive, imaginative, and breathtaking visuals that seem only to exist in a vacuum. There is no story to speak of. Some characters make sense while others you struggle to ascertain their motives or basic intent. It makes me very sad to say that it is a film made by someone who appears to have completely forgotten how to make a narratively cohesive film. I had long hoped for a great “third act” film from one of my very favorite filmmakers.

I was truly not prepared for this mega mess.

Megalopolis stars Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina, a visionary architect with dreams of remaking “New Rome” (basically New York City) into an efficient and visually pleasing city using Megalon (straight from the James Cameron school of naming things). He can also stop time for no discernible reason than to create unique imagery. An architect for the Instagram age, I suppose. His chief adversary is Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) who, backed by old money in the guise of Dustin Hoffman, wants to continue evolving the city in deeply old school ways using concrete and steel. They are further connected by Cicero’s emotionally torn daughter Julia (Game of Thrones‘s Nathalie Emmanuel).

Their adversarial relationship — they claim to hate each other but they rarely have much more than pissy debates — sets up the central question of the film: “Who controls New Rome?” or “Who controls the future?” That would have been fantastic theming with a deeper, more complex story, but here, it’s served up as the main course. That is the story. There is nothing else.

Most of the things you’ve heard about Megalopolis are true. You’ve really not seen anything like it, and your enjoyment of the film depends on your appetite for extremely experimental cinema. I love films that take chances, that take big swings, but there needs to be a story. You have to understand the characters, even if it is marketed as “A Fable,” there have to be stakes that engage the audience on both intellectual AND emotional levels. The film is full of interesting ideas, but they’re all buried in ham-handed dialogue (screenplay by Coppola) spoken by characters that don’t invoke any kind of audience response.

Naturally, the performances are all over the map. Most of Driver’s dialogue is delivered in Shakespearean bursts of intensity. It’s as if the actor thought, “Maybe it will sound better if I shout it with vigor.” Aubrey Plaza plays a social climbing journalist named, I shit you not, Wow Platinum. She brings life to her scenes by choosing to perform everything for those in the cheap seats. To say she’s over the top would be the understatement of the decade. Rivaling her performance in sheer velocity is Shia LaBeouf as Clodio, Cesar’s cousin who apparently also has the hots for Julia, although that is quickly abandoned. Sporting eyebrows mercilessly plucked in one scene to bushy and fully grown in another, he has the enviable task of delivering the line “Revenge is best when wearing a dress.”

Yes, it’s that kind of film.

This is clearly a personal project for Coppola. He has always wanted to use the full array of tools available to him as an artist to create stunning cinema. Here, he heavily leverages CGI to render images that would have been impossible 30 years ago when he’d initially conceived the “story.” Much of the film feels dreamlike. Coppola and his excellent cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr. (The Harder They Fall) create a gorgeous, colorful visual palate that would feel at home in a modern art gallery. I would happily watch the film again with the sound completely off just to bask in the visual splendor. But with the sound off so as not to affront with the atrocious dialogue.

And that’s where Coppola truly fails as an artist. Overconfident in his ability to deliver so long after his last successful films, he sorely needed collaborative partners to hone and fine tune his message. There is no shame in that. The scale and ambition here in the film would tax the most productive filmmakers working today. But he has no one telling him “No. That won’t work.” Instead, he seems to have directed the entire project high as a kite. The experience feels like sitting at a party next to someone stoned who wants to tell you what’s wrong with the universe and why they’re uniquely positioned to see those problems.

He also keeps referring to the negative critical reaction to one of his greatest films — Apocalypse Now. The biggest difference between the two films is that Apocalypse Now had a rough outline, governed by Joseph Conrad’s novella. Coppola could take wild divergences into the jungles because the original source material would pull him back into place. Here, he has no guardrails to keep him from wildly flying off the path.

I don’t mind films that stray from the path. I love big swings. But they have to have a hint of a story. I was never bored with Megalopolis. But it is not a good film. Not at all.

But, thanks to fascinating visuals and a handful of bonkers sequences, it isn’t one I’m sorry to have seen.

Megalopolis debuts in theaters only this Friday.