Francis Ford Coppola’s 2024 behemoth Megalopolis is the first and likely last film of its kind. It follows Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), an architect with a dream of a utopian society, his assistant/lover Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), and his rival, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who seeks to stop Cesar’s work. It also stars Grace VanderWaal, Shia Labeouf, and Aubrey Plaza as various citizens of New Rome, the movie’s futuristic version of New York.
It is a film nearly fifty years in the making, delayed first because of the director’s debts and later due to issues concerning 9/11. In 2019, the 80-year-old director sold part of his California winery for five hundred million dollars to fund the movie he had dreamed of since 1977. After the film was delayed further by the COVID-19 pandemic, production finally began in 2022. It was plagued throughout by issues including mass resignations of the art and visual effects teams, a trailer pulled due to fabricated critic quotes, and even allegations of on-set misconduct by Coppola. An extra, Lauren Pagone, reported to Variety that the director had kissed and touched her without consent. Coppola then filed a lawsuit against Variety for libel, which is still pending. An odyssey in its own right, filming concluded in 2023.
Despite being a decades-old project, Megalopolis feels surprisingly modern. It has a self-deprecating humor and awareness that is distinctly 21st-century. To Coppola’s credit, it is clear he has refined the film over time to keep it up to date with current aesthetic sensibilities. Visually, it is relatively polished; characters are bathed in a constant golden-hour light and drift between carefully composed set pieces wearing elaborate costumes.
The performances are nothing to write home about, though, the actors are not given much to work with. Esposito, Driver, and Emmanuel deliver cartoonish dialogue that sounds like it was written by a writer of a much lower caliber than Coppola. Emmanuel’s character is practically non-existent; she has no discernible motive, personality, or beliefs despite being the secondary protagonist. It is as if each actor thinks they are in a different movie: Driver is still stuck as Kylo Ren, Esposito is in a political drama, and Plaza and Emmanuel are in an oddball, tongue-in-cheek comedy. Tonally, the movie is all over the place. Is it about class struggle? Is it about the dangers of technology? Is it about police brutality? The movie is extremely heavy-handed without really being about anything, two qualities that inherently contradict each other. Sometimes, it veers into left field and turns into a superhero movie—Driver’s character has time-stopping powers that are never quite explained.
More than anything, the movie is confused. Coppola experiments with split-screens, non linear storytelling, and even a live-in-theater fourth-wall-breaking scene. Overall, the film comes off a jumbled mess, one five decades and 120 million dollars in the making.