Megalopolis (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – The city of New Rome faces the duel between Cesar Catilina, a brilliant artist in favor of an Utopian future, and the greedy mayor Franklyn Cicero. Between them is Julia Cicero, with her loyalty divided between her father and her beloved.

My Take – Widely considered as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, over decades, producer-director Francis Ford Coppola has created a monumental filmography, which includes the likes of The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), The Conversation (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979), The Outsiders (1983), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and The Rainmaker (1997), something only few could even dream of matching.

However his latest directorial, something that has been in planning stage for nearly 50 years, is a wild, bewildering, experience that takes some ambitious and frankly unnecessary swings that entirely undercuts every point he’s trying to make. Resulting in a bewildering cacophony, oscillating between the sublime and the awkward.

Self-financed with 120 million dollars out of Coppola’s own pocket, his first outing in 13 years, is an immensely interesting mess that I really wanted to like. But while it is flawless in its presentation, it does not impress with its visuals, which are largely uninteresting; it does not deliver an engaging plot, nor memorable characters.

Indeed, it’s a glorious, unfiltered mess from the mind of a genius who clearly stopped caring about what anyone thinks. It’s so bad, it’s almost brilliant, the kind of so-awful-it’s-genius nightmare that future cult fans will rave about.

Set in an alternate, 21st-century New York City, restyled as New Rome, which is at a point of collapse, the story follows visionary architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), the head of the Design Authority and a Nobel Prize winner, who trying to realize his grand ambitions of a futuristic, shape-shifting metropolis built from a newly synthesized sustainable material, called Megalon, something which promises to change the very fabric of society.

However, his dreams find opposition from the recently elected mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who is finding his popularity crumbling and had earlier tried to prosecute Cesar by accusing him for the murder of his wife.

The resentment is further stoked by Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), a former party girl who first begins working for and then enters into a relationship with Cesar.

Meanwhile, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), Cesar’s jealous cousin and Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a TV presenter and Cesar’s ex-lover, plan to exploit both the wealth of Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), Cesar’s uncle and the richest man on the planet, and the frustration of the population to take down Cesar and fuel their own rise to power.

Aside from the plot thread about a virgin musical prodigy, Vesta Sweetwater (Grace VanderWaal), being outed as less innocent as she seems during a performance, traditional escalation, structure, and payoff aren’t among director Coppola’s concerns. It’s certainly possible that some of the film’s plots are leftovers from the many iterations of the script that Coppola has been writing over for decades.

The oddest thing here is that there is a relatively straight forward and potentially brilliant film at its core. On paper, the fall of ancient Rome, juxtaposed with comparisons with modern day America is a great idea. The trouble is built on that skeleton of a good idea is a film chocked full of nonsense that serves no purpose to the characters or the narrative.

For example, Cesar Catalina can stop time. The how and why of the superpower is never really explained properly, nor does it really function as part of the anything important and just seems to be present for aesthetic reasons.

It’s challenging to understand what director Coppola‘s intention was with this film. Throughout he denounces the rampant hypocrisy and corruption of contemporary Western society. And although it originally conceived decades ago, the discussions raised here are surprisingly still relevant, especially the critique of mass media and mass politics.

But what it unfortunately lacks is structure and substance. A dozen well-thought-out metaphors do not make a good film. And blended with grandiose imagery, a thunderous score, and the ridiculous visual effects it bring a cheap surrealism to life. Yes, the film is not without redeeming features.

The design departments – production and, particularly, costume – have gone all out, reveling in an opulently lush color palette of regal dark reds and forest greens. And there’s the sheer scope of the ambition on show. And make no mistake, if this is the one, as many have speculated, that marks the end of Coppola’s career, it flourishes in the finality of a filmmaker who never held back and compromised on nothing.

It’s a film that operates without limits, and desperately believes that there’s a limitless world out there for us to explore. It is also unsurprising that considering how Coppola encouraged his actors to improvise and write certain scenes during the shoot, adding his own last-minute changes to the script, the performances are wildly uneven.

Being a brilliant performer, Adam Driver at least shows the gravitas to play his confused role. Still, he’s a lot more convincing when he’s playing Cesar as a genius than lengthy bits where we’re expected to believe he’s also a drug-addled playboy. Nathalie Emmanuel seems to be doing her best in a role that is clearly just a romantic interest to the male lead, however there is strange arc to her character that seems to have been undercut later on.

Giancarlo Esposito tries and mostly succeeds in trying to underplay his highly melodramatic role. Aubrey Plaza as a vampy cartoon femme fatale is one of the film’s more enjoyable elements.

Shia LaBeouf seems to be having a blast with his over-the-top character. Veterans Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman seem simply lost most of the time. Such is also the case of Laurence Fishburne, playing Cesar’s chauffeur and narrator to the fable, who along with Kathryn Hunter, Talia Shire and Jason Schwartzman is terribly wasted. On the whole, ‘Megalopolis’ is an ambitious lavish-looking but ultimately a muddled and chaotic tale of thwarted vision.