At the age of eighty-five years old, Francis Ford Coppola can finally say that his colossal project Megalopolis has reached the big screen. The original idea came to him in 1977, and he started working on it in 1983 but had to put it on hold for various reasons. Now, over forty years later, and over a decade without releasing anything else, the film director is presenting this project worldwide. Unfortunately, all of these years thinking about it and making it didn’t pay off — both economically (the film is having a hard time selling tickets) and creatively. Let’s get into it.
Like any other artist, Coppola’s decades-long career is a rollercoaster with its ups and downs, lights and shadows. He is the acclaimed director behind modern-day classics like The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather II (1974), which won him nine Academy Awards in total and over a dozen nominations; Apocalypse Now (1979), still to this day one of the – if not THE – best masterpieces in his oeuvre; Rumble Fish (1983), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). But there are also not-so-great movies, and Megalopolis is definitely on that list, ranking high as one of his worst.
First premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, both the audience and the critics warned us: Coppola’s latest movie was bad. It’s a pity to think that someone who’s been able to do incredibly brilliant pieces is saying farewell to his career with such a downer. But that’s life — unfair, most of the time. There are several issues in Megalopolis: a confusing and rushed storytelling (despite being over two hours long), an overwhelmingly ambitious vision that doesn’t quite land, a group of characters whose stories don’t click with the audience, and a disparity of elements that instead of making the universe original just make it baffling.
Looking on the bright side, the cast of actors, which includes Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LeBeouf, Giancarlo Sposito, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburn, and Dustin Hoffman, is quite convincing. The feelings of treason, ambition, chaos, remorse, love, and hope they embody and convey are really there — it’s just that their stories as a whole that don’t quite work. And the visuals are also something to be happy about, from the initial city’s skyline to the final Megalopolis, to the grand sets and interiors.
The film is set in a fictional city, New Rome (a replica of New York), in an unclear time period: the way people dress is highly inspired by the Roman Empire but from a 21st-century lens, while the cameras of the paparazzis and the TVs are from the ‘50s and ‘60s. The buildings are clearly from the 20th century, but the Megalon material, the main pillar of the movie, is something out of the future. Drawing parallels between the fall of the Roman Empire and the obscure-looking future of the United States, we see the tragic decay of the old order and the rise of a new way of thinking and doing.
The main conflict is between Cesar Caitlina (Adam Driver), a subversive architect who dreams of a bright future where we’re all equal, and Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the city mayor, a conservative politician splattered by corruption. There’s also Julia, the mayor’s daughter, who winds up working for Caitlina and later falling in love with him, thus creating a family (which is what helps bring Cesar and Cicero together at the end of the movie). There’s also a banker, Hamilton Crassus III, who owns everyone’s accounts and plays a pivotal role in the political game of the country, and everyone around him wants to profit off of him (from his new young wife, Wow Platinum, to his grandchild Clodio, a spoiled rich kid who aims to inherit the bank and become ruler of New Rome).
Just like Coppola has dreamt of Megalopolis the movie, Caitlina dreams of Megalopolis the city, an ideal place built on Megalon, a substance he himself developed that moulds to people’s needs. It’s incredibly malleable but also robust. And it works beyond construction: it also repairs organic tissues like skin, cartilage, and bone, as we see at some point (in that cute dog with a broken leg or in Caitlina himself). But creating Megalopolis comes with its hardships: they have to first destroy the old city to build it anew, which enrages the poorer, working class — as usual, the most affected by the decisions made in politics but the ones whose opinions are never taken into account.
In that turbulent context, where everyone fights for their sit in power, we also see the personal power struggles of the ruling class: treason, deception, plotting against each other. It gets confusing at some point. There’s an expression that sums it up: don’t bite off more than you can chew. Coppola has tried to tell an epic tale, a fable, actually, as it is presented in the beginning. But the result is pure chaos, unconvincing, and kind of going nowhere.