Megalopolis Review

Megalopolis was a film that was 40 years in the making, a passion project that saw Francis Ford Coppola return to filmmaking for the first time in 13 years.

New Rome is a city on the edge. Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) is unpopular and in conflict with Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), an architect and the inventor of a revolutionary material, Megalon. Cesar plans to regenerate the city and create a utopia, Megalopolis. Cesar makes many enemies on the way, including the people of the buildings being demolished, his jealous cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), and Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a power-hungry journalist. However, Cesar gains an unexpected ally, the major’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel).

Megalopolis was a film that Coppola wanted to make for a long time. He had been developing it since 1983 and he came close in the early noughties, but it was shut down due to the 9/11 attack. It was seen to be in bad taste to make a film about a New York-like city being rebuilt after a disaster. Coppola ended up self-financing the film by selling some of his winery business. It will probably be his last film.

Megalopolis competed for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and played at other major festivals including the Toronto International Film Festival. There’s no denying that Megalopolis was a film made with ambition that wanted to stand out in the sea of franchise films. The reception towards the film has been divisive. In the UK the poster highlighted positive reviews by publications like Deadline, Radio Times, and The Telegraph, but it was met with scathing reviews from the BBC, The Times, and Mark Kermode. CinemaScore collected audience scores in the US and they gave it a D+. This was especially bad since CinemaScore tends to be more positive towards films.

Coppola was aiming to make a grand family saga, like The Godfather Trilogy. Instead of Megalopolis being a crime story it was a political drama about various people making power plays. There were interesting ideas in the film, like the ideological debate between Cesar and Cicero since Cesar had visions of rebuilding the city and society, whilst Cicero had a more traditional outlook since he wanted to improve services. Cesar was a man obsessed with time and legacy and building Megalopolis would guarantee his place in history, whilst Cicero wanted to waste public funds on pointless things like schools and housing. Due to Cesar demolishing large parts of the city, it led to a sweep of anger from the residents of New Rome which a populist leader could exploit.

Megalopolis was inspired by the Catilinarian conspiracy, an event where Lucius Sergius Catilina tried to overthrow the Roman Republic. Coppola’s idea was to transplant this event to a city similar to New York. There were pontifications about the fall of an empire and comparing the Fall of Rome to the potential fall of the United States. These ideas would have had more impact if the film drew parallels from actual events that led to the end of the Roman Republic or the Roman Empire.

This transplanting of Roman politics into a retro-futuristic America made Megalopolis seem like a Shakespearian adaptation trying to modernise those works. It had the trappings of a Shakespearian play because of the dynastic struggles, Ceser and Julia having a Romeo and Juliet style romance, and characters like Cludio and his sisters acting a bit like a Greek chorus.

Coppola had a lot of influences when making Megalopolis. The silent film classic Metropolis was set in a grand, futuristic city that suffered from a wealth divide and needed a visionary to bring harmony. The works of Ayn Rand were present, particularly The Foundationhead and Atlas Shrugged since both those novels were about extraordinary people who were fighting against the conventions of their societies. Like one of the heroes in Atlas Shrugged, Ceser created a new construction material that could revolutionise an industry but was distrusted by people with vested interests.

Megalopolis did suffer from a bloated story. There were story points that didn’t go anywhere. Some were small like a French horn player who ditches his bandmates so he could hang out with some rich people. Others were bigger. There was a long sequence in a poorly green-screened arena where a pop star auctions off her virginity to the highest bidder. There was a sci-fi bend where Megalon gave Ceser the ability to stop time and it gave Ceser his obsession with time, but Ceser doesn’t use his time-stopping ability for anything. Megalon was like Spice in the Dune series, since it was used more than construction material.

Coppola self-financed the film so he wouldn’t have moneymen interfering, but the veteran filmmaker needed someone to tell him when something was a bad idea. Coppola has made classics like The Godfather, Apocolypse Now, and The Conversation, but his filmography has been mixed after the ‘70s. Megalopolis ended up being like another auteur-led folly, Southland Tales since that was also a sci-fi story set in an alternative version of America and made by a director who thought they were making something profound. Aubrey Plaza’s character felt like she stepped out of Southland Tale rather than a politically-centric film.

Megalopolis was a grand and ambitious film which I would normally applaud, but this is a case of directional hubris. It was a hotchpotch of ideas that resulted in an incoherent mess.