MEGALOPOLIS [2024]

Megalopolis (2024)
Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
Written by: Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel

USA

IN CINEMAS NOW

RUNNING TIME: 138 mins

REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera

In either the future, or in an alternate present-day reality, New York is now New Rome, where the heads of the city and the rich have adopted many of the traits of Ancient Rome. Franklyn Cicero is the Mayor, but he finds his rule threatened by a scientist mamed Cesar Catilina, who’s invented a revolutionary new bio-adaptive building material he believes can transform the city, and has ambitious plans to utilise it to construct “Megalopolis”, a futuristic utopian city of his own design. When Cesar’s mistress Wow Platinum leaves him to marry Hamilton Crassus III, an extremely wealthy elderly bank CEO and Cesar’s uncle, Cesar sets eyes on Julia, Cicero’s daughter, causing the feud to increase. Meanwhile the city is suffering serious unrest…

Francis Ford Coppola. The director of four genuine great movies: The Godfather, The Godfather Part 2 [which, heathen that I sometimes am, I prefer watching in their TV edit which combines the two films in chronological order with extra scenes], The Conversation [which I consider to be his masterpiece, a near-flawless motion picture] and Apocalypse Now. I also rate The Godfather 3 and Bram Stoker’s Dracula very highly, and have a real soft spot for Peggy Sue Got Married and The Cotton Club though many don’t. But outside of those, his work tends to consist of films which are far below that standard, either interesting failures or just average fare, meaning that his fairly prolific career has been rather spotty and unsatisfying. And recently, he just doesn’t seem to be much good. I haven’t yet seen Tetro, but Twix and the bafflingly muddled Youth Without Youth which seemed to have most of its scenes in the wrong order seemed to show that, while he was making only films that he really wanted to, he’d clearly lost his touch. Megalopolis is a project he first thought up in 1977 when he envisaged it as an opera to be performed on four evenings. Since then he’s tried to set it up as the film up three times, each time getting further, but a need to make some “commercial” projects in return for having two enormous flops, the Twin Towers incident [because of a scene in which a space satellite crashes into a city], and Covid all caused him to stop, yet he w0uldn’t be prevented from making his passion project, and finally it was indeed made, and from his own money, though not without a lot of incidents occurring on set, usually involving Coppola himself who seemed to like firing people as well as taking liberties with female performers. Nonetheless, one can only admire his determination, his drive – until one sees the final result.

This is a film I wanted so much to like, and to defend, but it really isn’t good at all. The chief inspiration is a historical event called the Catilinarian Conspiracy which took place in 63 BC in which there was an attempted takeover of the Roman consuls by a guy named Lucius Serius Catilina. It failed. Coppola decided that it would be an amazing idea to retell this story but relocate it a future America which has become rather like Ancient Rome, allowing for obvious parallels. Yes, it’s a fairly interesting idea, but is it one worth being so obsessive about? I suppose it might be thought to be if the really old Coppola had made it; it may not have been another classic. But what we have is such a shambles that now one wonders what on earth Coppola even saw in the project. And sadly I’m not even saying that it’s one of those glorious disasters that one can not help but admire and which you can have some fun with. Instead, the chaotic jumping from scene to scene, while the cast members talk randomly while obviously having been asked to hold nothing back, quickly becomes tiring and soon causes one to lose interest in the story. It’s truly astonishing how poorly this film has been put together, how much of a mess it is. It’s hard to imagine that any filmmaker would consider it, in its current state, as worthy of even being released to the general public, though I did wonder a few times whether Coppola, despite pummeling us with commentary on much used themes like power, jealousy and greed, was laughing at us, before always returning to thoughts like “why”? “what the f***”? and “Francis, you didn’t actually make this yourself, did you”?

So where to begin with the plot? At the beginning would be best, but I had such a hard time getting into this movie that I’m struggling to remember how it began, which is something I’m still usually able to do, though I do recall a small amount of scene-setting narration from Lawrence Fishbourne which sometimes returns and may have been added to make what’s actually happening clearer considering its childlike simplicity, and our main protagonist Cesar almost throwing himself off an extremely high ledge. There’s also a sort of orgy with, what with shots of two pretty women having fun on a horse, set up hopes that I was in for something like Caligula. No such luck. Soon we get a public confrontation between New Rome’s mayor Cicero and Cesar, who’s not just invented this amazing material called Megalon [the fact that something in this movie shares a name with one of the most outrageous kaiju is one of the few things I like about it], and wants to use it to transform New Rome and also, I guess, the world, but can stop time. Well, only sometimes. At times he’s not capable of doing so, though we aren’t told why, let alone how he’s able to do this feet anyway. It reminds me of the hilarious scene at the end of Starcrash when Christopher Plummer’s Emperor of the Universe is suddenly able to “halt the flow of time“, but that terrible movie was fun. Cesar is a clever inventor but is often distracted by the ladies, drinks and drugs. A short while back his wife died under a bit of a cloud, though he’s still sleeping with his mistress Wow Platinum. He has an uncle, Crassus III, a bank CEO, with whom he has a testy relationship. After Cesar announces his intentions in a televised speech, Cicero leads a smear campaign against him involving his wife’s death and the post-mortem disappearance of her body in unexplained circumstances, and Platinum leaves him to marry Crassus.

The wedding reception takes in an arena, though disappointingly we only see a few seconds of chariot racing and no gladiatorial combat, The main attraction is Vesta, a teenage pop star who has an innocent, virginal image. Then, while Caesar is getting very pissed and very high backstage, he’s attacked and can barely defend himself in one of the few good scenes in the movie, though that’s largely because of some nice visuals like Cesar imagining he had several arms. At the same time, an image of Cesar having sex with Vesta is broadcast on a screen above the arena. Cesar is arrested, though he’s ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing and released, the image having clearly been doctored, while Vesta continues her career after adopting a new rebellious and sexually charged persona. Cesar soon becomes acquainted with Julia, Cicero’s well-read daughter. While initially distrusting and spying on him, they soon go to bed together, something which, when he finds out, Cicero hates and wants to stop. When Julia reveals herself immune to Cesar’s ability to stop time, he brings her on to assist in the Megalopolis project which seems to be gaining fruition, especially when a disaster strikes the city . But I haven’t mentioned Clodio, Crassus’s nephew who initially seems to be helping his uncle but may have an agenda of his own as he begins to stir up disent at both Crassus and Cesar, and can we trust Platinum? The city is at melting point, but we only get a bit of a sense of this, probably partly due to a reduced budget which didn’t also allow for a depiction of what would have been a spectacular sequence. A prominent character or two amongst the “lower orders” would have considerably enhanced the scope of what’s a rather claustrophobic piece, no matter how many times cast members walk to different parts of rooms for no apparent reason, but Coppola unsurprisingly focuses on the battling well-off families.

Megalopolis feels longer than its 138 minutes, and yet it also seems like an hour or so was cut out seeing as there are some major gaps in the narrative, and that some scenes just weren’t finished; look out, for example, how the fate of the Dustin Hoffmann character is handled as one line of dialogue and a one-second flashback even though he had a role of some importance. So many scenes seem either too long or cut away from before they’ve finished, so the film never really finds a rhythm, and having nearly everyone perform in an over the top fashion soon begins to have a negative effect, especially what with the nature of what they have to say – and some of the perf0rmers should take the blame in how random and often just plain awful their dialogue is, because a lot of improvisation took place on set, while Coppola himself kept changing and adding things day by day.  Characters speak Shakespeare, shove down our throats the film’s themes, talk bollocks, and rarely seem like they’re speaking what they’d naturally say, while the undoubtedly very interesting cast [it’s very admirable, especially in today’s climate, that Coppola deliberately cast people with different political affiliations] rarely share any chemistry with each other. Adam Driver veers between not seeming what to do with his part and going all out, and Shia Lebeouf goes all out throughout, while Aubrey Plaza seems lost most of the time, though she does get to do a memorable bit of sexually charged campness, apparently also improvised, where she persuades one of the main male characters to do her bidding. But Megalopolis needed more stuff like this. People may often behave oddly, there are some bursts of bloody violence, splitscreen is employed and at great length towards the end, plus there are also a lot of pretty CGI visuals, especially when depicting Cesar’s planned utopia, but the thing still often looks like a TV production from the ’90s with its excessive brightness and flat look.

This insane production just doesn’t amount to an entertaining experience. At times it becomes that word I really don’t like to use – boring. Even Coppola’s comparing of the United States with Ancient Rome doesn’t really come off; all we really have are the rich folk dressing up as and behaving like Ancient Romans. His warning of totalitarian governments is still very timely of course, as is the idea of the technology being employed as a control device and a distraction from what’s really happening, fooling people into thinking that their life is amazing. I imagine that some have interpreted the ending as a silly happy one, but I don’t see it as being one at all. It seems bitterly ironic and very dark to me, and therefore nicely thought provoking, but most of what comes before is quite frankly something of an endurance test, while Coppola has sadly become one of the those elderly artists who has to keep creating but has lost most of his former talent and skill. He probably ought to give up on filmmaking now, though it’s certainly a shame if this will be the 85-year old director’s final motion picture. Megalopolis is nothing less than a disaster.

Rating: