Josh Reviews Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola has been talking about his dream project, Megalopolis, for decades.  I’m always interested in seeing artists given the opportunity to bring a dream project to fruition, and I believe that Francis Ford Coppola is one of the greatest directors of our time.  When his projects click, they tower over most other works of cinema.  The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now are four of my absolute favorite films.  I think they’re four of the greatest films ever made.

Now, to be fair, Apocalypse Now was released in 1979, and I don’t think any film Mr. Coppola has worked on in the decades since can equal any of those earlier masterpieces.  But while his career has had ups and downs, and he’s certainly released some stinkers over the years, I think he’s also helmed a number of solid, entertaining films, including The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, Tucker: A Man and his Dream, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  (I also think that if The Godfather Part III wasn’t compared to the first two brilliant Godfather films, it’d be considered a great gangster film, and I think Mr. Coppola’s recent re-edit of that film, now titled The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, is excellent.)

I was excited to see Megalopolis, but worried as well.  Even those films I listed in the last paragraph were made decades ago, and I haven’t been all that taken with any of the projects Mr. Coppola has brought to the screen in recent years.  (As an example, click here for my review of his film Twixt, recently re-edited as B’Twixt Now and Sunrise.  There were aspects of the film I found interesting, while other aspects seemed shockingly amateurish to me.)  I wasn’t excited by the trailers for Megalopolis, and the reviews have been dismal.  Still, I went into this film with my heart open.  I really wanted to like it!!  I was ready for an experimental film, and I was excited that Megalopolis seemed to have sci-fi aspects and also to focus on an architecture.  (Back in college, one of the best classes I took was called Film Architecture; it was basically the history of set design, but the class also explored the way in which certain films used architecture as a storytelling vehicle.  In that class, I gained new appreciation for films such as Blade Runner and Brazil, to name just a few.)  I was hoping that Megalopolis might tell a story in the vein of Brazil, but what Mr. Coppola has created is far wilder and weirder.

I respect Mr. Coppola for taking such a huge swing with Megalopolis.  This is a film packed with ideas; it has an incredible cast; there are moments that are visually stunning and memorable.  I’m impressed with how experimental Mr. Coppola continues to be; this film eschews anything remotely like a normal story structure, and the film is stuffed with narrative and visual playfulness.  (As an example, Mr. Coppola makes repeated use of a triptych approach, in which the screen is split into three panels — I found that fascinating.)

Unfortunately, while I believe that the ingredients of a great film were there, I just could not connect to Megalopolis.  Indeed, I confess that I barely understood it.  Characters and plot were extremely hard to follow.  I got extremely antsy in the film’s second half and repeatedly felt my attention wander.  (This is very rare for me to experience when watching a movie.)

Despite the extensive use of narration, there was little about the film’s story or characters that I found clear.  The film can’t seem to be bothered to connect any narrative dots for the audience.  We’re introduced to characters but told little about their backstories, about who they are, where they came from, or what they want.  And it’s not like much of that is clarified as the film unfolds.  Let’s take the film’s main character, the architect Cesar Catalina.  He seems to have the ability to stop time, and he has created a magical new building material called Megalon, which seems to be able to form any sort of shape or structure.  We are never told the origins of either.  We get hints that Cesar has a tragic backstory — his wife died, and he was accused of her murder — though the film never really clarifies what happened.  I had trouble even getting a bead on Cesar’s character.  At times he seems heroic and noble, at times almost a villain — stirring up trouble and unrest; never been clear about his plans or approach.  There’s a whole storyline in which he’s apparently blowing up people’s homes to make way for his city of the future — that seems quite villainous to me!  I didn’t feel the film allowed me to get to know or understand Cesar, and so despite Adam Driver’s magnetic and energetic performance, this was a slippery character to try to follow through the film.  I didn’t connect to him at all.

This problem affected almost all of the film’s characters for me.  There were incredible actors doing their best, and there were many individual scenes I thought were interesting.  But I had a lot of trouble following who was who and who wanted what.  And so the result was I didn’t care much about any of these characters, and I felt like the film kept me at arm’s length the whole way through.

While there were many times in which I felt the film was unnecessarily obscure, and I didn’t understand why characters were behaving certain ways or what they were thinking or feeling, there were also times in which I felt the film was overly obvious.  The central metaphor of America as Ancient Rome, grown fat and arrogant and ready to topple, feels like a profound and compelling metaphor for where we are right now.  And yet, I felt the Rome stuff was ladled on too heavily in the film; the metaphor was overly obvious to me two minutes into the film, when we see that the New York-looking city is actually called New Rome, and the main character is called Cesar, and many of the characters are wearing Roman togas or other Roman-looking costumes, and there were lots of shots of buildings with columns… I kept mentally thinking to myself: “I get it!”

The cast is out of this world.  I’ve already mentioned Adam Driver, who is a lot of fun to watch playing this outlandish character.  Even if I often felt like I didn’t understand what was going on, I always enjoyed watching Mr. Driver’s performance as Cesar.  Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad, The Mandalorian) fills the screen in the best way as Cesar’s main rival, Mayor Cicero.  I love the toughness Mr. Esposito brings to the role.  He’s a great antagonist for Mr. Driver’s Cesar.  Nathalie Emmanuel (Missandei on Game of Thrones) is wonderful as Cicero’s daughter Julia.  Ms. Emmanuel has incredible presence on-screen.  She made Julia the character I was the most interested in, and for whom I was rooting the most.  I wish the film explored her character as deeply as I’d wanted.  I wish I better understood her backstory, and what she was thinking and feeling as the events of the film unfolded.

Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation) was also terrific as Wow Platinum, a TV reporter chasing fame and fortune.  Ms. Plaza brought an exciting crackle to all of her scenes.  Shia LaBeouf is a somewhat controversial figure these days, but I thought he was terrific as Clodio, Cesar’s jealous cousin who is at the root of a lot of trouble in the film.  Mr. LaBeouf really dug his teeth into all of his scenes; he goes big, but it works perfectly in the wild, crazy film that Mr. Coppola has created here.  Speaking of going big, that brings me to Jon Voight, who chews every inch of scenery available to him as the wealthy Hamilton Crassus III, whose money many characters in the story are chasing.  Wow, this was quite a performance.  Whereas I loved Shia LaBeouf’s work, Mr. Voight’s performance was a bit much for me.  Laurence Fishburne, Jason Schwartzman, Dustin Hoffman, and Talia Shire all appear in the film, though I couldn’t tell you much about who they played.  (Either the film doesn’t make it clear — I have no idea who Jason Schwartzman’;s character was — or they just weren’t developed.  Laurence Fishburne plays Cesar’s loyal driver and assistant Fundi Romaine, but I couldn’t tell you one thing about his character beyond that, despite his getting a lot of screen time.)  I also want to mention Grace VanderWaal, who’s great in her scenes in the middle of the movie as Vesta Sweetwater, a teen star whose virginity is getting auctioned off.

Speaking of which — this is a very horny movie!  I was surprised by that.  There are a lot of scenes in the film in which characters are lusting after other characters.  I liked those moments in which I felt like I was seeing understandable human emotion on screen (as opposed to weirdness I couldn’t follow); those moments of sparks were appreciated.  I could see some being turned off by the sleaziness of some of those scenes, but I felt they fit well into Mr. Coppola’s vision of a corrupt, corpulent Rome-like society.

I praised the film’s visuals, above, and I don’t want to skip by that too quickly.  Yes, there are some CGI shots in the film that are not convincing.  But Mr. Coppola’s eye for a memorable image is still sharp, and the film is packed with sequences that I won’t spoon forget: Cesar’s perilous lean off of a tall building in the opening; Cesar and Catalina’s romantic moment, balancing on girders high atop the city (which is pictured at the top of this blog); Mayor Cicero’s office, in which his huge desk is tilted and mostly buried in the sand; the bidding war over Vesta, dangling seductively in a trapeeze in the center of an arena; Wow Platinum’s final fate.  I could go on.  I wish these visual pieces fit better together into a story I could understand and follow.

Is Cesar supposed to be Francis Ford Coppola himself?  There’s something both sweet and sad about that.  This isn’t the first time Mr. Coppola has made a movie about a dreamer of an artist (see, for example, Tucker: The Man and his Dream).  As with many aspects of this film, there’s a core of a good idea here.  An artist struggling to realize his creative vision feels like a compelling heart for a story, and Mr. Coppola certainly has a lot of personal experience to draw from in this area.  But also as is the case with too much of this film, I found the story muddled and hard to hold onto.  Just what is Cesar’s vision?  What will be better about his city of the future?  How does that excuse his blowing up people’s homes in order to build it?  I’m confused by Cesar’s vision and uncertain about his journey.  It’s hard to ignore the meta parallels of Mr. Coppola himself apparently getting himself into some degree of financial peril to bring this expensive film to life, only for it to bomb at the box office.

I’m glad to have seen Megalopolis, and I’m glad it exists.  I wish I felt it worked better as a story.  I wish I liked it more.  I wonder if this is a film I will ever watch again.  On the one hand, I could see myself never wanting to revisit this.  On the other hand, I could see myself someday wanting to revisit this bizarre film Mr. Coppola has created, to dig around in its ideas.  We’ll see…

Please support my website by clicking through one of my Amazon links the next time you need to shop!  As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.  That means I’ll receive a small percentage from ANY product you purchase from Amazon within 24 hours after clicking through.  Thank you!

Please help support my site by purchasing a copy of my latest comic book, Brother’s Keeper, which tells a true story from Israel’s 1948 War for Independence.  Click here to order a print copy, or click here to read it FREE on Kindle Unlimited!!

OR, click here to order a copy of my graphic novel, José and the Pirate Captain Toledano, a story of Jewish pirates that’s also a powerful coming-of-age story about “finding one’s tribe” and one’s place in the world.