Review: Megalopolis (2024)

Anyone who, like me, is sometimes prone to talking too much has experienced a moment, mid conversation, when his claims and points have started to grow and exaggerate and even become absurd. Maybe it was to an end: to win the argument, or to drive home a particular point, or to make an impact, even if your idea is rejected. Sometimes, we’re just looking for a reaction, whether it’s more questions or igniting a debate. Several times throughout Megalopolis—the strange political fable Francis Ford Coppola has been developing for 40 years and finally made—Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina emphasizes the importance of getting people to start talking about whether a new world is possible: “when we ask these questions, when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.” That, to me, seems to be the point of Megalopolis, and in that respect, at least, the film is a success.

We can feel Coppola bubbling up with ideas. We can sense the artist truly going out on a limb. But we also feel on occasion like someone trapped with the guy at the party who talks too much, nodding our heads as we ask ourselves which absurdities are actually believed in and which were just thrown out there to see if they stick. Coppola, who has been no stranger to production difficulties throughout a career that has strived for independence from studios, apparently couldn’t find anyone to bankroll him for Megalopolis, and he had to muster the $120 million plus budget himself. If the personal financing gave Coppola total freedom, Megalopolis also shows the detriments of an old master doing what he wants with few to caution or advise. Megalopolis is an ambitious cinematic venture: sometimes hamfisted, sometimes absurd, sometimes unhinged, yet still admirable, because it is a venture. We can sense the risk, and should applaud the daring.

There were not a lot of people in the theatre with me, but we were all laughing a lot, probably in different ways, and some shouted at the screen repeatedly. Anders and I had a lively discussion afterwards in front of the cinema with a fellow patron, who hated the movie. I expect that Coppola’s approach here is unpalatable for probably 95% of the population (just as 75% can’t really watch a silent movie). Megalopolis cuts against the basic idea that what we are seeing on screen is, in some way, a direct or photographic or simulated representation of reality (even in movies with fantasy we expect that what we see accords with how things would play out in a fantastical world).

Not so with Megalopolis, which does not always accord with reality or logic. In one of the first scenes, Cesar, atop a skyscraper, walks out to the edge and tempts fate. Just as he is about to fall, he says, “Time, stop!,” and lo and behold Cesar has the power to stop time. However, Cesar’s ability is not used as a superpower in any conventional sense, and it is never really explained, except, perhaps, in a later conversation about how artists and poets and musicians and architects all manipulate time and space as the basis of their craft. Unspoken is the obvious truth that film also manipulates time and space. Megalopolis, at times, leans into its artifice. Indeed, it declares its unreal approach on its title card: “Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable.”

Of course, a film’s vision of reality on screen is always mediated by our expectations as well as conventions of genre and representation. The fable subtitle should have clued in more people than it seems to have done. This is not a realistic story. It won’t make regular sense, so don’t worry about that.

Nevertheless, in terms of style and referentiality, Megalopolis engages with many familiar things. There is truly a lot going on here, probably too much. In the film, Coppola operates in the mode of family melodrama, urban noir, Roman epic, political drama, science fiction, alternate history, and more divisively, silent film, expressionism, absurdism, techno-fable, and allegory.

The film is set in New Rome, an estranged version of New York City, but Laurence Fishburne’s narrator always reminds us—in voiceover atop titles carved into marble to drive home their meaning and import—that New Rome is the American Republic. In this version of the world, Driver’s Cesar is a famous architect and head of the city’s Design Authority. Cesar has recently won the Nobel prize for developing a strange, pliable, changeable metallic element called Megalon. Cesar wants to level the old slums of the city and build a new, daring city of the future, with organically shaped, growing, almost alive buildings, park spaces, and free public transportation. He is the man with the big idea, and he wants to implement it. Naturally, the established order is against him. He’s a character out of Ayn Rand, for sure.

Opposed to him is Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito, the current mayor and head of the faction that thinks they need to preserve things as best as they can, given the current situation. Cicero is conservative, establishment, and fundamentally practical, as opposed to the lofty ideas and dreams of Cesar. Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight) is Cesar’s super-wealthy elderly uncle and bakeroller. Crassus’s son, Clodio Pulcher, is lecherous, crazy, ambitious, and resentful of Cesar, and he is, appropriately, played all out by Shia LaBeouf. Wow Platinum—yes, her name is Wow Platinum—played by Aubrey Plaza, is a TV journalist with aspirations for wealth and Cesar’s hand.

The female lead, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), is the daughter of Cicero, and she becomes the lover of Cesar, in just one way that the film imbues the story with Shakespearean drama. The film recalls Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest, among other works by Shakespeare. At one point, Cesar quotes most of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be speech,” and it is unclear whether Cesar is quoting Shakespeare or whether the film has simply absorbed Shakespeare into its dialogue. It’s that kind of a referential film.

Most of the cast is up for the crazy melodrama and absurd humour. Aubrey Plaza nails it. Adam Driver is well cast, as his portrayal leans into the emotion and self-seriousness of the character, while others go more for the humour. Shia LaBeouf is hilariously perfect, as is Jon Voight. Unfortunately, Emmanuel (who did well in Game of Thrones) just doesn’t supply the heft or energy to make her hold her scenes against Driver; her lines almost always sound flat in comparison to the hotspots on screen. The supporting cast and small cameos are endlessly amusing: Laurence Fishburne, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, even Dustin Hoffman, and (of course, for Coppola) Talia Shire.

It’s fitting that a movie with a Design Authority looks so stylized and outlandish, so obviously designed and not photographically captured. New Rome retains aspects of our modern world, but it is also very Roman. We see chariot races, and Cicero’s suits resemble togas. I like these pseudo-Roman aspects—the costumes, the Madison Square Garden Colosseum—as well as the historical weight and possible interpretations these Roman elements add to the story.

This is also a film by a director with a lifetime of experience and a wealth of film knowledge. The intertextuality, in fact, helps to explain a lot of the movie. The tilt of shots in Times Square near the end recall Citizen Kane (1941) and its political rally. Indeed, much of Megalopolis imitates Welles’ epic yet human view in both Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Osvaldo Golijov’s score opens with the drums and booming brass of a Ben-Hur (1959) or other Roman epic. There are also references to Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Coppola’s canon, from the family politics and backroom deals of The Godfather (1972) to the apocalypticism, symbolism, and use of overlapping images on screen in Apocalypse Now (1979).

It’s a film that really leans on these intertextual connections. Although Megalopolis has been marketed and released widely, I’m not sure how many filmgoers in 2024 can truly process a movie like this. For example, the film expects you to be not only passingly familiar with the look of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the landmark science fiction silent film about a futuristic city, but more specifically, to remember its cheesy theme—“The mediator between the head and hands must be the heart.” Knowing that, or having seen the films of Eisenstein, explains so much of the tone and mannerisms of Megalopolis, which are highly bizarre in 2024.

It’s a movie that also tosses out lines propounding big themes, like a fable does at the end of the story. At one point, Cesar talks about the power of love. Is it the character’s point, Coppola’s, the film’s, or that of all three? Even the final moral, which is a universalized Pledge of Allegiance spoken by children in voiceover, has to be considered as likely the belief of Coppola’s but also perhaps Cesar’s. The fact that we see Fishburne’s narrator/assistant of Cesar actually writing in and reading from a handbook, where he records his histories, as he delivers his narration suggests that his narration should be taken not as straightforward but rather as another layer of mediation in the story.

In a big scene in New Rome’s Colosseum, a pop starlet named Vesta (Grace VanderWaal) sings her big number. She is the city’s vestal virgin, the community's embodiment of innocence. It’s a great moment where the film moves from abstracted ideas to direct confrontation with our culture. A character uses Vesta to attack Cesar, by showing to the massive audience a video of her having sex with him; later in the film, we see a clip of her as a bad girl pop star now. If scenes like that don’t tell you this is, in part, a parody, and that the film knows it is trying to be absurd and provoke laughter, then you aren’t getting it.

At the same time, Coppola is trying to provoke more than laughter. Megalopolis operates like a floating touchstone, or better, a carnival mirror of our current moment, refracting, and elongating, and exaggerating the images and ideas of our age. In this sense, the film is perfect for 2024, a year of decision and changing directions, with numerous big elections around the globe. But you would be wrong to think Megalopolis contains direct allegories, as some critics falsely surmise. Yes, at times characters recall Trump, and Cesar is clearly an Elon type at times (just as he is also Randian). Cicero is a Democrat city machine politician, in many ways, as well as being a conservative. We see spectres of populism, cronyism, corruption, and astroturfed protest. We see elements of different parties and competing ideologies. Nothing is locked down in one-to-one allegory.

This, in my view, makes Megalopolis also a proper utopia, less like other movies making political statements in the 2020s, and more like the original Utopia, written by Thomas More and published in 1516. Both works can be read in multiple ways. They are purposely oblique, seeming to directly touch on some aspect of society, only to become slippery and evade our firm grasp.

At the same time, Coppola seems to genuinely yearn for a better world, but I’m not sure his vision of Megalopolis, the city Cesar wants to build, truly succeeds to capture the sense of promise and wonder he might have hoped. In a sense, once you visualize it on screen, that locks the idea and its promise down, and some will find it appealing and others won’t. In a way, his Megalopolis looks too old-school, too much like the visions of the midcentury. The film works better when it’s a carnival mirror, skewing our visions, than as a program for the future.

Nevertheless, one reason I appreciate Megalopolis is that I find the root idea apt at putting its finger on our moment. We are at the end of something, whether it is the postwar consensus, the international rules-based order, the American Empire, whatever. However you want to understand our moment or draw its lines (from the Second World War, or when?), we all sense the potential for big changes on the horizon as well as the forces that seek to prevent the changes. These desires for change and stasis, in different and contradictory forms, and for different things, exist within all our political parties. Is Megalopolis a story of decline and fall, or revolution and renewal, or something else? Whatever you think, Coppola has put his finger on that fracture point, the vital question: is a new world possible?

In The Last Jedi, Driver’s Kylo Ren says, “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.” It was a striking meta-comment in a movie all about uprooting George Lucas’s vision for the Galaxy Far, Far Away. Lucas’s mentor in the early 1970s was Coppola, and Driver here gets similar lines that seem to tap into not only our age and our political moment but also what Coppola as an artist wants to say: “Don’t let the now destroy the future,” Cesar says. What is the future of cinema? Is there a future? Does it have to die to be reborn?

Amid our Franchise World dystopia and its endless currents of content, in 2024, a year of legacy sequel after traditional sequel after remake, I have to be grateful for this absurd moonshot of an original film.

7 out of 10

Megalopolis (USA, 2024)

Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola; starring Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, and Dustin Hoffman.

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