Is Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ a Mess or Masterpiece?
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Is Megalopolis the magnum opus of one of cinema’s great auteurs or the fever dream of an old man who is not used to hearing the word no?
Legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola has been working on this movie for about 40 years now and has been influenced by everything from the Fall of Rome to Shakespeare to some lovely Haitian immigrants he befriended—at least according to the Q&A he did recently at the New York Film Festival. With all these influences, it’s really hard to describe what this film is about.
Adam Driver is the Caesar Catalina, a brilliant visionary whose rise to power ruffles the feathers of the heavy hitters in New Rome. He wants to change the world using a new substance he discovered that will lead humanity to a utopia, but the powers that be want to take him down.
Those powers include Giancarlo Esposito as Mayor Cicero and his daughter Julia, played by Nathalie Emmanuele, who eventually sees that Catalina is the real deal and falls in love with him.
Another big standout is Aubrey Plaza—who is giving Janet Snakehole as a social-climbing reporter.
The film is chock full of highly controversial, which has led to a lot of discourse online. We’ve got problematic people like Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, and Shia LeBeouf—who is a terrible person in a way that really fits this character.
The story is complicated and often hard to follow, the dialogue feels unnatural and sometimes jarring, the performances are all over the place like everyone is in a different movie. In many ways, it’s a giant mess, but it’s also a wholly unique cinematic experience.
There’s really nothing like it. Yes, there are shades of those influences and other films—at one point I was thinking of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and the Star Wars prequels—but the sum of Megalopolis’s parts is something you just don’t see anymore.
It’s the kind of wild, creative vision that has largely disappeared as movie budgets ballooned out of control and franchise films took over the megaplexes.
And I have to be honest, at times, it was glorious.
After so many years of what I have dubbed cinematic mac and cheese—prequels, sequels, reboots, remakes, and studios milking preexisting IP—seeing Adam Driver do Shakespeare in a Coppola movie felt like a breath of fresh air.
It’s probably fair to assume that 90% of people are going to hate this movie—there are parts of it that I hated—but there’s something here that is so different and so unique that it can’t help but be fascinating, and if you’re a film person, it’s absolutely worth seeing for yourself.
