Score: 1.5/5 stars
It is an entirely joyless experience to witness an artist’s passion project crumble under the weight of their own ambition.
Unfortunately for legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, best known for The Godfather trilogy, his latest film Megalopolis is a massive pile of dung forty years in the making.
Set in an alternate version of New York City, known as New Rome, the story follows architect Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) on his mission to build a better city. His radical vision is at odds with the authority of the city’s current mayor, Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who favours a more practical reform. Aided by Cicero’s daughter Julia, Cesar spends the film challenging the notion of a modern empire, timelining its birth, peak and ultimate collapse.
Ironically, the only empire that falls in Megalopolis is the film itself, and like all high-reaching empires, it falls hard.
At ground level, Megalopolis is a film with an identity crisis; it never quite knows what it wants to be, and no number of quotes pulled from a Stoicism 101 guidebook littered throughout the script can rectify this issue. The film is a seemingly limitless string of ideas loosely tied together, not culminating as anything. This is the product of someone always playing devil’s advocate with themselves, never settling on anything besides a self-absorbed debate.
The film’s identity crisis is worsened by its convoluted worldbuilding. At points the film feels strikingly futuristic, akin to the Blade Runner universe, while at other points it feels like just another day in New York City. This spoils any attempt at immersion and leaves behind a film that feels directed by different people.
The worldbuilding is damaged by the confusing costume design. In some instances, characters are donned in clothing clearly reminiscent of Ancient Roman attire, but other times they are dressed like anyone you might see on the street today. It doesn’t help that the Roman outfits could have been selected from any clearance bin at Party City, harming the film’s chances at being taken seriously. If anything, they fit in with the hastily designed visual effects and set.
In one scene, Cesar and Julia talk while standing upon beams suspended off the side of a building. If they take the elevator all the way to the roof, where are these beams being held from? Furthermore, the clouds are seen passing rapidly over the city in the background, yet the beams the characters stand on are stationary, with the characters hardly being affected by wind at all.
Movies deemed “bad” typically spark the “poor acting vs. poor writing” debate, which is often an offshoot of the “chicken or the egg” debate. In this case both aspects are equally dismal, feeding off the mess they create.
Furthermore, there is a lack of explanation and lore-building around the revolutionary technology in the film. Caesar uses a tool known as the Megalon to sculpt infrastructure of his envisioned city, but it’s never quite explained how this works or what any of the material is. Of course, movies do not always have to be bound by the logics of reality, but the lack of depth to what the Megalon is makes the whole idea of it feel insignificant.
The actors never quite seem in sync with one another as well; it’s like they all interpreted the script differently, exuding the feeling that they’re each acting in a different movie. Driver does the best he can with a role that feels relatively hollow, with little backstory or stakes beyond a soiled marriage. Aubrey Plaza garners a few laughs from her typical sarcastic delivery, but her character feels unimportant and forced into the story.
At several points the script enters uninspired exposition territory with characters exclaiming their actions too often. The exposition dumping is so blatantly tacked on to move the convoluted plot forward that it borders on cringeworthy, completely absolving the film from having any tactful narrative coherence.
Megalopolis is also a film that stresses the importance of the future but ignores the fact that without adequately fleshing out the past that brought you to the present, a promising future is about as great a pipe dream as winning an award for excreting this catastrophe of a film.
And yet, upon finishing this movie, you can’t help but ask yourself if somewhere there is a good film to be extracted. Megalopolis’ audacity is almost admirable, its chaos probably enjoyed best if you don’t enter the theatre sober, but this is precisely what leaves it feeling so inoffensive and unexciting. If your finished product is a bad movie, this is exactly what you want: a film so bad it’s good because of how innocuous it is.
Although there are a handful of quotable moments that lead the film down this path, Megalopolis loses itself in its own confusion. What you’re left with is the ruins of a fortress built on toothpicks: of course it was going to collapse.
Behind the disconnected parts that make up the fragile empire of Megalopolis, there are glimpses of a good film buried somewhere if you squint your eyes. Unfortunately, it will likely be looked at as a tragic ruin of what could have been, a reminder of how not to realize a creative vision.