Directed By Francis Ford Coppola

Starring – Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel

The Plot – The city of New Rome is the main conflict between Cesar Catilina (Driver), a brilliant artist in favor of a utopian future, and the greedy mayor Franklyn Cicero (Esposito). Between them is Julia Cicero (Emmanuel), her loyalty divided between her father and her beloved.

Rated R for sexual content, nudity, drug use, adult language and some violence.

Megalopolis – Official Trailer (2024) Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza (youtube.com)

POSITIVES

Much can be said and even debated about the execution of ‘Megalopolis’ but epic scope in scale certainly isn’t one of them, resulting in a Roman fable set in contemporary America that certainly has no problems capturing the evocative and provocative attention of its audience. They simply don’t make movies this immense in concept anymore, whether in the 120 million dollar price tag that Coppola himself fully fronted, or the dazzling auteur summoning his most expressive presentation, and though the narrative has so many problems that kept the engagement from fully finding its footing, the spectacle and radiance of the pageantry is littered casually throughout every spellbinding and stimulating frame, with vintage peephole transitions, and expressive artistic direction gifting fantastical imagery in this crumbling ruins that only a filmmaker of this quality and experience can capably conjure. On top of this, some of the performances are credible, despite the questionable intentions of Coppola steering them, primarily Emmanuel and Esposito, who tonally feel like the only actors who know what kind of movie this should be, instead of the one it ultimately ended up becoming. While Emmanuel often caters to Driver’s own internal conflicts, she bestows an air of grace and elegance between the depths that commanded and charmed the audience, and when combined on-screen in being joined for a few scenes by the powerfully seething Esposito, elicits a father/daughter dynamic that truly felt like the only stakes in a movie that represents the fall of civilization, especially when one development between them re-evaluates the circumstances during a second half to the film that was far more interesting than the first.

NEGATIVES

Simply put, this is one of the biggest onscreen disasters that I’ve experienced this year, with nearly every creative component to the film further driving a wedge to my waning interests, which grew greater the longer the film persisted through nearly two-and-a-half mind-numbing hours. For starters, the script is an incompetent and even incoherent mess, composed of a series of sociological commentaries from Coppola that on their own feel ambitiously inspiring, but together fail to find a common thread of making them relevantly symmetrical towards one another. This makes the film feel like a series of skits, instead of one consistent effort, where it will focus 10-20 minutes of its idealism towards toxic stardom, upper class greed, and even Donald Trump, among its many unfocused topics, and without resolution or guidance towards alleviating a single one of them, besides Coppola simply telling us to work together, they drown on in this nauseating sense that bordered pretentiousness from its positivity, resulting in a film that feels every bit of its length and then some, with very few moments of effective emotionality that connects to its audience. The concepts themselves can easily be interpreted to anyone using even 15% of their attention span to the film, but it’s further drowned on by overhead narration from Laurence Fishbourne’s character and others quite literally spelling out the script’s many thematic impulses, and though subtlety would be appreciated in a film that echoes many of the problems we face in our own society, Coppola would instead rather frequently reiterate what has been repeatedly established, emitting this inescapable bubble of annoyance that made me audibly groan each time the intention found its way to heavy-handed dialogue that never wasted an opportunity to hold hands with an audience who Coppola knows is checking their phones, by this point. This is where things get really messy because tonally this film promises urgency and vulnerability to the capture of its setting, then wastes them away with exaggerated and silly antics to its characters that grows old fast, especially in the confines of so many gifted actors and actresses downright humiliating themselves with stains in deliveries that will haunt them for the rest of their careers. Among them is definitely Shia LeBeouf and Aubrey Plaza, who not only feel plucked from an entirely different movie all together that rambunctiously urges them to continuously chew the scenery in distracting methods, but also smothers any semblance of tension or suspense to the storytelling, which definitely feels preoccupied with prolonging these sequences as long as artistically possible, all in the name of constantly alienating an audience who by the film’s midway point are quite literally checked out (As evidenced by the two people who walked out of my screening, and never came back). Even Driver’s approach is strange, as his spontaneous dancing during interactions and one-dimensional emotion is distracting in the most annoying kind of way, made worse by the fact that he’s our primary protagonist that we’re unfortunately saddled with. If the humor was even frequently effective in garnering laughter, then I could’ve forgiven this embarrassing attempt, but it often opts for the shock humor kind of material that tries too hard to attain this cause, outlining how it can’t even do the simplest things effectively to deviate from the overwhelming disappointment this truly is. This is followed by the technical capacities of the movie’s presentation, which amateurly enacted, feel primed to destroy everything about the aforementioned scope and spectacle that is easily among the film’s grandest quality. Between relaxed editing that definitely could’ve used another studio cut to maintain some of the momentum of these developments, some of the year’s worst greenscreen backdrops, or spoil-heavy photography that gave away the intention of some of the film’s most excitingly enticing sequences, everything feels counterproductive to the enveloping and immersive essence of this imaginative world, crafting more distractions than a film already handicapped by such bizarre choices should demand. On the topic of the artificial backdrops, I was quite literally stunned that a movie with a 120 million dollar price tag seemingly didn’t use any of it to deviate away from such hollowly vapid backdrops lacking any semblance of depth or believability, because they are Windows 95 levels of artificiality, especially during sequences of Driver and Emmanuel overlooking the city, which somehow doesn’t attain any wind in sight or sound designs, to match this incompetence. Finally, and perhaps most vital to my experience, the characterization in the film falls completely flat, without a single credible or compelling person to faithfully invest in. As previously mentioned, Emmanuel’s character is the closest to this concept, but the fact that the script wastes little time fleshing her out, or giving her a conflict of her own that doesn’t serve to accommodate another character, is a major issue towards earning my empathy, leaving it difficult to care or even appreciate the highs and lows of these character’s journeys, especially considering so many of them are greedily driven and obnoxious to continuously grate on my nerves.

OVERALL
‘Megalopolis’ projects a catastrophic sociological collapse, but its greatest disaster is ultimately the one inspired by Coppola off-screen, with a thematically scattered and incoherent mess of titanically epic proportions that doesn’t feel like it was made for anyone in particular. Between prolonged sequencing that squeezes every second out of its 133-minute run time, and a mostly wasted star-studded ensemble, the film is easily one of the year’s biggest bombs, landing somewhere between the minds of its depleted audience and the wallet of Coppola, who spent forty years and 120 million dollars on something finalized as a waste of time and money.

My Grade: 3/10 or F+