When you think of one of the most important filmmakers in history, there’s a good chance that Francis Ford Coppola may come up in discussion. Even if we’re going to ignore the fact he made The Godfather, between movies like Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the man simply has a filmography and influence that is hard to top. So seeing him come out of retirement to make Megalopolis, a movie that has been a pipe dream of his since the 80s, is exciting.
And with that polite introduction out of the way, allow me to now explain why Megalopolis is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen that singlehandedly drags Coppola’s name through the mud.
Megalopolis
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Release Date: September 27, 2024 (Theatrical)
Rating: R
The plot of Megalopolis is, to say the least, incomprehensible. Normally I try to offer up some general overview about what the plot of a movie is like, but Megalopolis is so quick to throw away its own plot threads that it’s almost meaningless. Megalopolis stars Adam Driver as Caesar Catilina, the creator of a miracle material called Megalon, and how he has a bitter rivalry with the major of New Rome City, played by Giancarlo Esposito, over the direction of how the city should grow, if at all. From there, the plot splits into so many different directions with plenty of bizarre characters and segments that it more or less loses the plot after only just a few minutes.
Now let me make this clear – I am not giving a negative review of Megalopolis because of the recent allegations that came out regarding Coppola’s behavior on set or how he laid off nearly the entire VFX department of the film (though we will touch on that later). I want to try and separate Francis Ford Coppola the person from the artist. If we’re going to judge Megalolpolis as a work of art, it’s a film that has barely any structure as Copolla gives into excess and glamour without stopping for a split second to think if he could or should make the decisions he made.
For example, the movie begins with Caesar about to jump off of a building, but he uses an ability to stop the flow of time and marvels at the New Rome City skyline. Why he has this ability is never explained or used in any meaningful way. It’s not even used for any unique visual sequences outside of the film’s final shot. It’s just something that’s there and occasionally gets brought up before being quickly shuffled away. In fact, that’s how Megalopolis approaches most of its ideas. It has them, then like a child with ADHD, drops them after a minute or two for its next idea. There’s a major moment early in the film where Adam Driver is accused of having sex with a minor and this is meant to be a devastating blow to his career, only for the next scene to say it was all AI generated and he’s actually innocent. It’s never mentioned again, so what was even the point? Also, wow that description really does help put into perspective what’s going on in Copolla’s mind about certain trends within Hollywood and the world at large.
Copyright: Lionsgate
Normally, I’m okay when a director tries something different and take risks. But while ambition is appreciated, the result has to be at least be good. I loved Babylon, but you could also accuse it of being an overambitious mess. The difference here is that the film’s presentation is so haphazard it makes you question if this was done with a human hand and mind or if AI wasn’t utilized in some capacity to get this into theaters. From a visual standpoint, the film is just ugly to look at. It’s a mess of bloom effects and bright imagery with some of the worst greenscreen I’ve seen in some time. Nobody looks like they’re actually where they claim to be, let alone interacting with each other on set. There are even montages showing some of the magical effects that Megalon can have on the world, but all of those sequences depicting the brilliance are so generic that, again, it comes across as AI, devoid of all human ingenuity and artistry.
I know that may sound like a cheap insult, but it drives home just how ugly this film is, and that’s before we get into how predictable and pretentious it is. Megalopolis tries so hard to compare Rome to America, but each of these grand ideas that the film presents all feel tired. It’s nothing new comparing Rome to America, but Megalopolis makes it sound like it’s the first film to ever make that connection. Lawrence Fishburne narrates almost the entire movie but does so in a way that talks down to the audience as if the themes of this movie are so complex that Coppola inserted this narration in post-production to try to make it all more comprehensible.
But it’s all so obvious. Within the first few scenes, you’ll know exactly what Megalopolis is about, even if you get lost in the disorienting confusion it intentionally makes to try and appear smarter than it is. Having the supporters of Clodio, a political upstart played by Shia Lebouf, curse at everyone and have his supporters walk around with MAGA signs isn’t a clever commentary on the state of the political climate in 2024. It’s just a cheap ploy to tie Lebouf to Trump and use it as shorthand for political extremism and why he’s a bad guy. It amounts to nothing, and that subplot doesn’t even start until the last third of the movie, so it’s frankly insulting that the film tries to talk down to its audience with such cheap parallels and expects you to lavish praise on how deep it is. It’s pretentious in every definition of the word, plain and simple.
Copyright: Lionsgate
I feel no qualms about using the word pretentious because that’s exactly what the film is – pretentious. One of Adam Driver’s first lines of dialogue is to recite Hamlet’s “To Be Or Not To Be” speech. Why? Because it sounds sophisticated. In the scene, the mayor of New Rome City (God I hate writing that) is saying how a demolished building will be used to build a casino, only for Driver to burst in and start reciting Shakespeare without warning. It makes no sense why his character would do that and none of the themes of the soliloquy relate to anything of the movie’s themes. Adam Driver’s character doesn’t contemplate suicide or stop to think about the madness he’s created in the world to do what’s right. He just says the speech because, to the general population, it sounds smart, so it must be smart.
Even though there is no narrative reason why the script is as odd as it is, there is a simple answer: Coppola merely wanted to. He allegedly allowed a lot of improv on the set and allowed the actors to experiment with what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it, and then just threw it in because. Adam Driver likes Hamlet’s speech, so it’s in the movie even though it makes no logical sense why it would be there. It’s the same reason why Aubrey Plaza, who plays the infuriatingly named Wow Platinum, intentionally mispronounces words. Because she wanted to try it. A movie needs a firm hand of a director in order to achieve a certain vision, but Coppola’s freewheeling throughout the production makes it come across as sloppy.
Nothing is consistent in the movie. Driver is too rigid. Aubrey Plaza is too dramatic. Shia Lebouf thinks he’s in a cheap B movie. Jon Voight thinks he’s in Caligula. There’s no unifying element to the film that grounds the viewer. We’re just thrust around from scene to scene and expected to follow what the hell is happening. The film won’t offer any support in keeping up with its plot. You’re simply expected to go along with the ride and hope that something sticks with you. But then again, considering the film is so garish and laughably executed you’ll most likely remember it for that rather than for anything worthwhile.
Copyright: Lionsgate
That’s not even getting into the general weirdness of the movie itself. I mentioned the time-stopping part that serves no purpose and Driver’s Hamlet speech, but then there are brief moments that serve no purpose other than to be weird. There’s a pop singer who everyone glorifies because of her virginity. An Elvis impersonator sings that national anthem as anarchy overtakes New Rome City. A literal parade of clowns starts to dance in Madison Square Garden while Adam Driver tweaks and spazzes out on drugs. Adam Driver is at a press conference, which only encompasses an eighth of the screen at the bottom, all so that certain screenings can have “interactive elements.” Those are just a few of the moments that made me burst out laughing in my theater, a theater where people were actively leaving the film at numerous points, never to return. At the end of every scene, I would look over to my girlfriend and ask “What just happened” and she couldn’t give me a straight answer.
So Megalopolis is bad. That much shouldn’t be surprising given everything so far, but it goes beyond that. There’s virtually no enjoyment to be had in this movie. It’s an incomprehensible movie that doesn’t even offer joy from ridicule. Sure, I laughed at all of those strange moments when they popped up, but it’s not the kind of laughing that’s so bad it’s good. It’s the kind of laughing you get when someone who tries so hard and talks such a big game trips and falls flat on their face. It’s a mocking laugh. It’s the kind of laugh that you make when you’re vindicated because you knew something was going to fail and you’re watching it happen in real time.
Again, I have no animosity to Coppola. He directed The Godfather! But at the same time… he directed The Godfather. The man knows how to make movies and knows how to direct them. He has no excuse for delivering a film that is this bad. None. The only reason why Megalopolis exists is because of sheer hubris from a director who thinks he’s revolutionary and delivered something that is anything but. It’s the reason he gave it a five-star review on Lettrboxd. When I was watching Megalopolis, I was thinking about how much it reminded me of Southland Tales, a movie that was equally a disaster, but at the very least that movie had a smaller budget.
Copyright: Lionsgate
If you’re the kind of person who thinks that there is depth to Megalopolis, while I’m normally the kind of person who accepts differing opinions regarding the interpretation of art, I have to put my foot down and disagree with you. Whatever ideas Coppola may have had are buried under a nonsensical execution that is so scattershot that it’s almost incoherent. I would like to get into a debate with you so I can systematically shut down each and every argument about this film. This isn’t a cult classic in the making. This is a self-inflicted mortal wound for a director who should have never stepped back into the director’s chair.
If you’ve been a reader at Flixist for a while, you may know that we don’t tend to use the extreme numbers of the 10-point review scale we have. It takes a lot, and I mean A LOT, for us to consider a movie a 9 or above, which is considered to be genre-defining in our review scale. Conversely, while we’ve reviewed plenty of bad movies, we rarely go into the 1 range because there are usually some redeeming factors in a movie, whether they be a scene, a concept, a performance, or just something that saves a movie from being utter trash.
There is no saving Megalopolis. I tend to keep my reviews now around a neat 1,500 words, but even in this extra-length review, I could keep going. I could do a moment-by-moment breakdown of why Megalopolis is awful. I would relish it. The last time I hated a movie as much as Megalopolis was when I saw Cats in 2019, and even now, I would rather watch that affront to the musical theatre community than watch Megalopolis again. At least Cats is insane and inept in a pathetic way. Megalopolis is just frustrating. It’s frustrating how a movie this bad could still be made today and how nobody in the making of this movie tried to stop Coppola from making it.
Oh wait, those people were probably fired. Never mind, now it makes sense.
