Right before the lights went down at our press screening for “Megalopolis,” the long-gestating opus from “Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola, a gentleman a row behind me said the strangest thing. “I don’t know if this movie will be good,” he said. “But I do know it will be great.” At that moment, I had no clue what the hell that was supposed to mean, but by the time the credits rolled, I had no choice but to submit to that peculiar contradiction.
If you’ve heard of “Megalopolis” at all, it’s likely been in the context of it flopping at the box office and being considered one of the worst films of 2024.
If you’ve heard of “Megalopolis” at all, it’s likely been in the context of it flopping at the box office and being considered one of the worst films of 2024. Coppola, a towering icon in the history of American cinema, sold his lucrative wine company to finance this $120 million experimental sci-fi drama starring a who’s who of big-name performers, only for it to recoup 1% of its budget in the opening weekend and elicit confused eye-rolls from the mainstream market place. Why such a negative response?
Setting aside its troubled production, a marathon of controversies, and lofty expectations, “Megalopolis” is uniquely challenging to sell. In the film, Adam Driver plays Cesar Catilina, an architect in a futuristic version of New York City called New Rome. He has a vision for building a new utopia that brings him into conflict with New Rome’s mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito.) There’s a sprawling supporting cast and several blink-and-you-’ll-miss-them side plots. Still, the thrust of the narrative is the ideological debate over the future between these two men. That conflict manifests through a fraught love story between Cesar and Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), a young woman who finds herself falling for her father’s rival.
There’s a sprawling supporting cast and several blink-and-you-’ll-miss-them side plots. Still, the thrust of the narrative is the ideological debate over the future between these two men. That conflict manifests through a fraught love story between Cesar and Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), a young woman who finds herself falling for her father’s rival.
Explaining the proceedings in more detail than that requires a lengthy history lesson on the Catilinarian conspiracy of Ancient Rome, an intimate knowledge of Coppola’s oeuvre, and a litany of his cinematic influences and inspirations. But none of that would change the fact that “Megalopolis” is the furthest thing from easy viewing. It isn’t as confrontational or hostile as many capital “A” art films, but it’s just so much.
Coppola has been writing and rewriting this film since the late 70s, and an early 90s draft has been available on the internet for a decade or more. Reading it in anticipation of finally seeing the film, it was one of the most God-awful screenplays I have ever read, and I’ve read hundreds if not thousands. Ridiculous dialogue, entirely too many characters with strange names (“Wow Platinum” “Fundi Romain”), and so many ideas and concepts that there’s hardly time to digest or process them all. While I have read great scripts that turned into terrible movies, I’ve never encountered the inverse. And for the film’s first act or so, I didn’t think that would change.
For the film’s first act, it lived up to the reductive reactions its trailer inspired. Its digitally washed-out, orange daylight images and non-descript futuristic environs resembled a Linkin Park video from the early aughts. Feeling more theatrical than cinematic, characters were often staged to “cheat” their bodies and their speech toward the camera, as actors often do in a play to aim their presence at the audience. The performances, isolated from proper context, were all varying degrees of overinflated. Some choose to go broad, playing to the cheap seats, while others go inward to a degree that is both bewildering and hilarious. No one could be faulted for thinking the haters were correct in their summation of the film as an extremely expensive and indulgent version of Tommy Wiseau’s trash classic “The Room.”
But a curious thing happens in the second act. As day turns to night, the picture’s visuals come alive. Cesar takes a long drive from the pristine and shiny parts of New Rome he resides in over to the poorer, struggling neighborhoods further afield. The broader portrait of the status quo he rebels against only grows more enrapturing once we see how complicit Cesar is. For all his poetic bluster, he remains one of the drug-addled haves enjoying bacchanalian pleasures far from the have-nots. He and many others chew the scenery and wring their hands at the complex political and economic issues affecting their city. Still, no one seems to do anything about them.
In the film’s most impressive sequence, Cesar and Julia attend a wedding reception for Cesar’s ex Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a gold-digging TV journalist, and his rich uncle Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight.) It’s an epic, decadent event, with professional wrestlers and circus performers standing in for gladiators, QR codes emblazoned on auction paddles, and enough glitter and colorful lighting to mistake New Rome for Baz Luhrmann’s Verona (“William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet”) or Joel Schumacher’s Gotham (“Batman Forever.”) For the duration of this scene, Coppola weaves so many images, perspectives, moods and tones together, shrinking and expanding time.
It’s a plot-heavy sequence, but the particulars of the plot don’t feel necessary. There is a rawness on display, like plunging your hands into something primordial, some alchemic, chromatic goop that sticks the fingers when you retrieve them. From that moment on, as much as the narrative fumbles and as fleeting as it feels as a traditional moviegoing experience, you won’t be able to take your eyes off the pure energy on display. It is too engrossing a collage of sight and sound for many of the nitpicks one might feel about a blockbuster motion picture to hold.
Howard Hawks, perhaps the greatest American filmmaker who wasn’t a household name, once said a good movie has three great scenes and no bad ones.
Howard Hawks, perhaps the greatest American filmmaker who wasn’t a household name, once said a good movie has three great scenes and no bad ones. “Megalopolis” has more than three great scenes and plenty more bad ones, but together they add up to an experience whose power outweighs its considerable foibles.
“Megalopolis” is now playing exclusively in theaters.
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