Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Cast: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Jason Schwartzman, Talia Shire, Grace VanderWaal, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman
Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola
138 mins. Rated R for sexual content, nudity, drug use, language and some violence.

2024 has been a big year for long-gestating, self-funded passion projects. Between M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap and Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga, these films have ultimately underperformed. Still, I’ve had high hopes for Francis Ford Coppola’s sci-fi fable epic Megalopolis. Coppola’s the kind of director that’s always trying to reinvent, try something new, and for most of his career, he’s been able to accomplish that. I had no idea what Megalopolis would even be about, but whether or not you like the finished product, it certainly isn’t boring.

Set in the futuristic city of New Rome, the film follows the feud between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver, Marriage Story), an artist looking to build a utopian society, and Mayor Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito, MaXXXine), the greedy and corrupt leader of New Rome. Caught between them is Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel, Furious 7), the mayor’s daughter who hopes to bridge the two men.

After seeing the film last night, I needed some time to truly figure out my thoughts on Megalopolis, and I’ve been searching for the right word to describe the experience. A moment ago, it came to me: Baffling. Megalopolis is utterly baffling. My thoughts on the film seemed to change scene to scene. Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) has made a truly strange epic as his “opus” and it was full of elements I loved and elements I hated. Perhaps that’s what genius is, but through the many iterations of this film over the decades, the one we landed on just isn’t very good.

Megalopolis is ambitious, but it’s also overreaching. There are numerous plotlines, a multitude of characters (nearly all of them seemingly in different movies), and some of the strangest dialogue I’ve seen in any recent movie. I get the idea that Coppola has overworked this screenplay, and he was very much needing a co-writer to work his ideas into a more palatable version of this story. Most of his biggest hits had other writers or were at least co-written by others. I think Coppola held this film close to the vest, perhaps too much so, and the finished product suffers for it.

It seems like the cast did the best they could with interpreting Coppola’s screenplay, but there’s some obvious people-in-front-of-a-green-screen effect here that hinders some of the performances. I wish there had been a better focus on practical effects to keep the actors in an environment with real props. The frequent computer-generated imagery often pulled me out of the narrative.

The first half of Megalopolis is much stronger than the latter portion, mostly because the film has a better focus on its most compelling narratives. There’s a big sequence involving a wedding that seemed to be where the narrative exploded into numerous subplots, but prior to that, I was vibing pretty well with Megalopolis. Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix) narrates the film as Cesar’s driver and assistant, and his voice centers the narrative nicely at the beginning. Within this early portion are some truly spectacular moments, like when Cesar is being driven through the city streets and sees the various statues, representing the ethical values of society, coming alive and toppling before him. Moments like these worked very well.

If the various plotlines of Megalopolis had come together better at the end, I would’ve been able to recommend it, but the climax of each seems to undervalue and underwhelm, including the main plot of the film with Cesar and the Mayor, who both make some odd character leaps that didn’t feel earned at all. While these endings had good intentions, nothing in the end of the film makes good on some of the film’s better motivations, like Cesar’s wanting to have a conversation about the future, something Coppola obviously feels passionate about.

Though I was fascinated by parts of Megalopolis, the movie is an absolute mess filled with truly odd pieces (never thought I’d hear Jon Voight talking about having a boner in the same film as Shia LaBeouf paraphrasing Thomas Becket, but here we are). Still, part of me wants to see the film again, after a time. I really wanted to love this one, but Coppola’s taking a number of simplistic ideas and relating them in an unsatisfying narrative with underdeveloped characters crisscrossing through each other’s stories. This will be a divisive film, and one that some will change their minds on over time, but I was ultimately disappointed.

2.5/5
-Kyle A. Goethe