A conservative mayor and a forward-thinking genius battle over the control of a futuristic city called New Rome.
An all-star cast, high-budget, neo-noir mess with ambiguous parables. Putting one’s thoughts together to explain how one feels about Megalopolis might be equally challenging as understanding the film itself. Here’s a potentially interesting sentence for you: Imagine two historical Roman rival figures, Lucius Sergius Catilina and Marcus Tullius Cicero, in a new Rome that resembles a neo-noir, retrofuturistic New York, battling for the city’s control. That’s the plot and the straightforward part – probably the only. Some elements that might help you make sense of the rest of the parts but are simultaneously confusing are: People sometimes act like Romans, but sometimes they don’t. The mayor represents the present and his rival the future, but it is unclear how this future can be materialised. Consequently, you’ll constantly wonder what Megalon is and how it works.
While wondering about all these and more, the numerous characters, the intricate montages, the extravagant visual effects, the infinite quotes and poem citations, the stoppage of time, the scandals, the not-always-obvious parables, and the reason(s) why you actually sit in front of the screen get in the way of justifying its existence and your time spent watching it.
Writer/producer/director Francis Ford Coppola spent $120,000,000 and funded Megalopolis all by himself, a project he had written and wanted to develop since Apocalypse Now (1979). Ever since the project fell apart time and time again until it made it to the big screen this year. Can you imagine what happened? It unfortunately tanked. After all those years of preparations, of writing it and rewriting it, of casting it and recasting it, of developing it and redeveloping it… it instantly tanked. Why? While I can’t tell you with certainty, my educated guess is that it is too convoluted, lacks purpose, it is unclear if it is meant to be taken entirely seriously, its audience is undefined, its statement about the connection of Rome and the USA is vague and, maybe, but don’t quote me here, it tries to become the next Citizen Kane (1941). Who knows, maybe, one day it will be.
I wish someone knew what the director of The Godfather (1972) was thinking. Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Audrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D.B. Sweeney, and Dustin Hoffman perform brilliantly. But do they know what Coppola was thinking?
Megalopolis’s cinematic qualities are lost in the perplexed narrative. Watch it to see a unique case of “old wine, new bottle.” If it works or not, it up to you to decide.
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