Megalopolis Review: Just An Apocalypse
Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic
Megalopolis is a long-in-development feature film from one of cinema’s great auteurs, Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola conceived of the film as far back as the late 70s and has been working on it off and on for decades. It has been wildly anticipated and widely speculated about for just as long, with Coppola speculating that his vision's scale and scope might be unfilmable. Sadly, Coppola may have been better off if it had remained unfilmed.
Coppola’s epic takes place in an alternate United States and blends classical Roman history in a modern setting, with New York City known as New Rome. Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) is a Nobel Prize-winning architect who has invented a new building material, Megalon. He aims to revolutionize the cityscape of New Rome and, hopefully, usher in an urban utopia.
Cesar’s vision for the future has roadblocks, mainly in the form of the mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who, when he was D.A., had tried but failed to convict Cesar for the murder of his wife. Cesar comes from a wealthy family headed by his uncle, Hamilton Crassus (Jon Voight), who has a troublesome son, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf). Aubrey Plaza’s media personality/reporter, Wow Platinum, wants to get her claws into wealth and power by any means necessary. Further complicating the picture is Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, who takes an intellectual and, eventually, romantic interest in Cesar.
In addition to the main cast, the film is littered with well-known faces, ranging from Laurence Fishburne serving as the film’s narrator but also Cesar’s driver and assistant to Jason Schwartzman as a member of the mayor’s inner circle, who I’m not even sure has any dialogue. Dustin Hoffman, Talia Shire, Kathryn Hunter, James Remar, D.B. Sweeney, and more all have minor supporting roles. It’s almost like Coppola’s version of The Irishman, working with his go-to people for one last big hurrah.
Credit should be given where credit is due. Megalopolis is a bold and ambitious attempt by a renowned filmmaker aiming for greatness. It is a passion project, to be sure. Coppola poured his own money into the project. There are big, bold ideas and big swings that this film takes. There are also some genuinely breathtaking images scattered throughout this film. One that comes to mind is a Russian satellite crashing to Earth and lighting the night sky over the city. In another scene, as Cesar drives through the city at night, large sculptures dramatically change their positions as his car drives past them, a visual metaphor of the despair Cesar feels for the city, perhaps.
Unfortunately, this beautiful imagery is few and far between and interrupted by shots that look shockingly cheap for a film that costs so much money to make. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to this of a film where the pendulum swings so wildly from one extreme to the next in terms of cinematic quality.
It’s probably not a good sign that the film's title card is Megalopolis: A Fable. Coppola may as well have underlined “A Fable” because so much of this story is overstated. Drawing parallels between the fall of ancient Rome and the future of America is not exactly a new idea, as plenty of digital ink has been spilled about late-stage capitalism. There is nothing subtle about this film, everything it has to say about the opulence, decadence, and hypocrisy of the rich, it has to say in grand gestures and big, bold lettering to the viewer.
It's challenging to think of a single performance that works in this movie. I’m a fan of most of these actors, Adam Driver especially, but his Cesar is an uninteresting lead character who ultimately conquers and wins the day by delivering a Cliff Notes version of John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged, “WE ARE IN NEED OF A GREAT DEBATE ABOUT THE FUTURE!”
Driver and Emmanuel have zero chemistry, and their relationship suddenly springs to life almost out of nowhere; one moment, he is pinning for his deceased wife, and then suddenly, he is swept up by his newfound love for Julia. Aubrey Plaza may be the only performance that stands out from the rest, getting to vamp it up as an unscrupulous TV reporter and clearly having more fun than anyone else in the film.
Shia LaBeouf and Jon Voight give the two most cringeworthy performances here. Voight looks and feels entirely out of place and out of his depth as one of the actors with top billing in this film. The conclusion of his character’s story and how hammy he plays it borders on embarrassment.
As for LaBeouf, I think he is generally a talented actor (his performance in Fury remains my favorite of his), but this is a Razzie-worthy performance as the jealous cousin who goes from parading himself in total drag at one point to being a thinly veiled stand-in for a MAGA-esque rabble-rouser.
(In fairness, I don’t think any actors could make this script and this dialogue work.)
Practically all the significant characters' names are cribbed from antiquity, but so are the haircuts and much of the production and costume design. None look worse than whatever they decided to do to poor Shia LaBeouf and his eyebrows.
This is a weird concoction of a film to take in and assess. Frances Ford Coppola has made three of the most iconic, epic films ever (The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II, and Apocalypse Now). The production of Apocalypse Now, the final product from that chaos, and Coppola’s building-the-plane-in-the-air quality of making that film is legendary. You can almost feel Apocalypse Now nearly reaching the breaking point of becoming unwieldy, but Coppola somehow manages to wrangle it and rein it in. It’s almost like musicians back in the 60s and 70s who would drop acid or other psychedelic drugs and then produce a magnum opus album but in film form.
Megalopolis is the opposite of the psychedelic, magnum opus experience, like a band that locks itself away for months and months and comes out with a double album that is an overstuffed dud that is entirely and utterly incoherent. The size and scope of the film are both too great and too unmanageable. It is trying to do too much and say too many things but is also not saying much that is deep or thought-provoking at the same time.
Maybe 40+ years of mulling over a project is too much. It’s clear that somewhere along the line, he lost the thread. Is it wildly ambitious? Yes. Does it also wildly miss the mark? An emphatic yes. Instead of being a triumphant capstone on the career of a legend, it instead is going to be remembered as one of the great misfires and box office bombs in the history of film.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars