Megalopolis (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is like a large, ornate, ugly-as-sin family-heirloom art-object gifted to you from a beloved elder family member: Gee thanks, now what the hell am I supposed to DO with this thing? The film is a decades-in-the-making work by one of the defining artists of American cinema, Francis Ford Coppola, who’d been developing the project – about a supergenius architect who invents a miraculous substance he’ll use to construct a utopian city in an alt-reality modern-day Rome – since the 1970s, predating Apocalypse Now. Suffice to say, it took many fits and starts to get the thing rolling, with Coppola eventually selling a piece of his winemaking business to fund the reported $120 million-plus budget himself, and the result is… well, awful. The film grossed less than $14 million during its theatrical release – total bomb city, bro – possibly because it’s a pretentious, incomprehensible slop job that’s contrived to be divisive.
MEGALOPOLIS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: The names of the people here. Oh god. Between those and the zillion high-minded quasi-literary ideas running hither and thither and higgledy-piggledy throughout this movie, one might theorize that the yes men surrounding Coppola probably died from overexertion. We meet his protagonist, Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), as he steps out on a ledge and lifts one foot as if to jump, and then he stops time so he can’t fall. Yes, he can stop time. By saying “Time, stop.” When he wants it to start back up, he says “Go.” How and why he can do this will never be explained, so don’t exert yourself trying to figure it out. It just is. Cesar isn’t a very happy man. His wife died a while back, and the mayor of New Rome, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) prosecuted Cesar for murder, but didn’t convict. So Cesar throws himself into his vision: Constructing Megalopolis, a utopian city with moving golden sidewalks and tall gleaming buildings and all that shit. And he’ll use a material called Megalon that he invented, which we see as a lousy CGI effect. Megalon won him a Nobel prize, and here I can’t help but pause to mention how, for some of us, Megalon will forever be one of Godzilla’s most beloved and rubbery foes, and much, much more fun than this movie’s Megalon.
Cicero, an archconservative who’d rather build a casino than Cesar’s vision of the World of Tomorrow, thinks Cesar’s Megalopolis sucks. “Concrete concrete concrete!” bellows Cicero’s compadre Nush Berman (Dustin Hoffman), stumping for a good old-fashioned material that works perfectly fine to build cities, and also describing Coppola’s dialogue. Powerful male heads of families comprise New Rome’s upper-crust power hierarchy, including Cicero and banker Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), who’s also Cesar’s Trumpish uncle. Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), Cesar’s cousin, is a maniac partyboy who soon gets into politics and riles the working class against Cesar’s Megalopolis vision, and their protests include red ballcaps and Make Rome Great Again placards, something that I think preceded the fall of the Roman Empire.
Amidst the political brouhaha, Cesar drops his TV quasi-journalist girlfriend, the vampy Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), for Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), a partygirl who finds her focus when she swallows the Megalopolis vision and helps Cesar make it a reality. Yes, Wow Platinum. Wow Platinum is a shamelessly manipulative sleeps-her-way-to-the-top golddigger and social climber who marries Crassus for his fortune, prompting a moment in which Shia LaBeouf calls Aubrey Plaza “Auntie Wow” while she shoves his face in her crotch. Cool scene. Not insane at all. Totally normal thing you see all the time in tons of movies. Where is all this going? To a most inscrutable place, I tell you. Also, a Russian satellite plummets toward a destructive end on the Earth’s surface. And Julia can stop time, too. That seems like something I should’ve mentioned earlier. Well, here you go. I just mentioned it. There’s a bit with a tuba player too, but that could’ve easily been edited out, along with many other things, e.g., anything that doesn’t make sense. But that would leave us with roughly a seven-minute short film, maybe six.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Megalopolis is Tomorrowland meets Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow meets Atlas Shrugged meets The Hunger Games meets The Phantom Menace, and yes, it’s as insufferable as that sounds.
Performance Worth Watching: LaBeouf is by many accounts a problem of a human being, but his off-the-hinges performance is the only thing in the entire movie that’s almost entertaining.
Memorable Dialogue: Just imagine the scene accompanying this Jon Voight line reading: “Whaddaya think of this boner I got?”
Sex and Skin: Some humping, female toplessness, Plaza in a see-through nightgown, Shia LaBeouf’s big ol’ Shia LaBeoush.
Our Take: Megalopolis is absolutely a film from the maker of Youth Without Youth, Tetro and Twixt. Coppola is much closer in time to those under-the-radar misfires of films than his ’70s and ’80s classics – although it also recalls his more audacious flops like One from the Heart and Tucker: The Man and His Dream. And audaciousness is the key weapon in Coppola’s arsenal here. You’re either going to appreciate the grandiose artistic stab he takes with Megalopolis, or you’re going to decontextualize its own dialogue and interpret it as self-owns: “Stop. This doesn’t make sense,” Julia says. Or Wow Platinum’s more harsh and to-the-point missive, “F— your stupid Megalopolis.”
To be fair, you can’t say Coppola is lazy. Far from it, actually. His story is driven by a series of ambitious notions about civilization, human nature, socioeconomic division, politics, art, sex, life, death, the passage of time, the universe and the eternal battle between progress and preservation. Thing is, you have to shove a lot of clutter out of the way to get to this unwieldy amalgamation of ideas: Ugly and pervasive CGI environments, gross misogyny, stiff dialogue, fluttering capes, awful haircuts, a go-nowhere subplot about a virgin pop singer, big dumb allegories, impenetrable allegories, DOA allegories, Laurence Fishburne playing the omniscient narrator and an on-screen character who talk to each other, LaBeouf’s distracting eyebrows, the nagging feeling that Cesar the great misunderstood genius who toils endlessly at his own psychological expense amidst an artistic vision quest is a stand-in for Coppola himself, Voight’s erection, and characters uttering moronic drivel like “architecture is frozen music” and “don’t let the now destroy the forever.” I could go on.
The biggest issue here is Coppola’s battle against an invisible foe: coherence. One pictures him writing the screenplay, starting with a big mess of subtext, then layering a thin veneer of plot on top of it. His primary ingredients are classical philosophy and history, and a general high-mindedness that comes off muddled and pompous. He gives us little reason to laugh (eyerolls are frequent, though) or be emotionally involved with the drama – the characters are either impenetrable (Cesar’s inner life ranges from slightly tortured to very tortured) or over-the-top caricatures, and the narrative is an addled, draggy mess that never generates suspense or settles on a tone, and struggles to convey basic story points and character motives. I certainly hope the film isn’t Coppola’s attempt to make sense of the world.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Give Megalopolis some concrete concrete concrete shoes, and a push off the plank.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
