Megalopolis (2024)

I fucking love this movie.

I intended to make this a double feature with 2019's "Joker", as both are "about" "society". The main difference is "Joker" is full of nothing, and "Megapolis" is full of everything: ideas, scenes, opinions. The double feature, however, is currently undoable, as there is so much of everything that I would need to see the film again, which statement I qualify with seventy asterisks.

I heard of "Megalopolis" shortly after it released. People compared it to a Neil Breen film. This is true and false. It's definitely a bigger budget Neil Breen film: Coppola sold a share of his winery purported to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But I found "Megalopolis" so fascinating that I kept reading reviews, and one Reddit review convinced me I had to watch it, which is surprising as I rarely watch movies. The argument was that Coppola's film defies so many things learned as a film student, that it's astounding that it still works. That raised an eyebrow, and that made me think, "I have to see this movie. This is something I would do."

Which is an incentive for someone with bad taste, but I prefer bad taste to no taste.

"Megalopolis" is a lot of things. It analogizes the end of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Empire to the current state of America (I myself am no fan of the Empire). It is a political story about a young genius struggling with the forces that be to progress humanity. It is a tale of the artist attempting to give humanity light in spite of the human vices around him and within him.

Here's one thing though that people miss: it is also a fairy tale.

I'm no acolyte of Coppola, but I think critics miss this fact the most.

But I don't blame them, because Coppola made the film very confusing to understand on a thematic level.

Let's just talk about the make of the film first. The reviews are bad for a good reason. The dialogue is god awful. I could not stop laughing at times. Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the love interest of Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), introduces herself as a med student drop out. For no. Reason. Cesar's mother talks about string theory for no. Reason. In the aforementioned introduction of Julia, she and Cesar have a "witty" dialogue that was written by robots. The film was written by robots, things that struggle to understand human emotion, but not AI, which is the garbage dump of human writing.

By the way, Cesar's biggest innovation for humanity is more moving walkways. No joke. There's a great scene at the end of the film where Cicero's wife suggests "Come with me to the future!" and he slowly, reluctantly and begrudgingly gets on the walkway that is taking them lazily and slowly through the city at "Pokemon Go" speed which, by the way, is a real fucked-up thing to subject a person with a walker or a cane to and would give the MTA lots of shit.

Some scenes are just cut hilariously. The hardest I laughed was during Cesar's skin graft. This scene was most Neil Breen where someone is softly explaining the pseudo-scientific background while Driver's face is superimposed of images of him dying. Oh, and Driver's death moans? Fucking. Hilarious. And the movie has ... a narrator. It has a narrator. He sounds like Morpheus. I have laughed so many times when the film would cut to the narrator "wisely" summing up the meaning of the scene we just saw. But I kinda like the idea of an overarching historian. Platinum's ultimate death also received a huge cheer from me. I really don't want to spoil it, I'll only say: I died laughing from Jon Voight's lazy drawing in that scene.

The movie is a funny movie, but this quality is not necessarily unintentional. The movie is also genuinely funny. Coppola may be a robot, but he loves people. Driver, in a near out-of-character moment, takes the prompt of "What do you think of megalopolis?" with a sarcastic response: "Are you serious? The city is about to implode! I have no idea what I'm doing!" then adding, "I'm joking, the city is safe." There's the lovely "Where did Eddie go? Wherever he went, we'll go the other way." Then there's the famous line by Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), "You're anal as hell, Cesar. I, on the other hand, am oral as hell." The best scenes in the film are full of people, depicting people living life rather than describing it. One of the earliest good scenes is of Cicero's (Giancarlo Esposito's) parade, full of verve and music, that is broken up by Cicero's ranting about how people hate him. There's a great transitional scene of people enjoying Christmas. By far the best sequence of the film is in the "Colosseum", where Coppola shows every variety of human joy and sin, through the clubbing, the wrestling, the acrobatics, the cringey (but intentionally cringey!) pop song. This is the most appropriate use of Cicero's abstract scenes, where he is falling apart physically and mentally. Of course the director of "Apocalypse Now" is capable of capturing chaos and human energy.

Then there's just beautiful shots, of Grand Central looming into view as the historian talks about time, of the shadows of people burned onto buildings as Carthage falls down. Coppola is still a great film maker, just not a good story teller.

To address a major criticism: no, Cesar does not have time stopping powers. It's not a "power" as it doesn't help him in any way. Instead, it's another metaphor: this is Cesar's ability to see things "unto eternity", to create immortal works, to create the future, so to speak.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's talk about the first theme: the Roman Republic analogy. This does not fit immediately, because the end of the Republic was a bloodbath. Senators openly killed each other. A good reason, and one of many, for why the man to be named Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon was so that he wouldn't be assassinated in the future (Cassius and Brutus' murder is an inevitability rather than a consequence).

It's unlikely Coppola intended the film to be a one-on-one analogy then, considering this and many other discrepancies. (A big one is that Cicero lives. The real-life orator Cicero did not. That being said, Cicero's haughtiness did make me think of recently indicted NYC mayor Eric Adams.) So let's take it broadly: the references to Cicero, Catilina, Cesar and Crassus are not meant to represent their real-life counterparts, but the idea of these people. Obviously Cicero is very conservative. Cesar is a flawed innovator, though, besides Augustus, the first five emperors of his empire were dogshit. So on and so forth. I would need to see the film again to really understand this theme, or conclude Coppola fucked it up, so I'll move on.

Well, let me add on this first: I have pondered a lot on how you could write a story connecting the current situation in America to a prior day situation, history going in spirals and all that. The conclusion is that the factual comparison will certainly all be lost unless the story is a literal retelling of the past situation. Thus Shakespeare was wise and literally did just that. Coppola tried, he might have failed, I don't know, or we're misreading his attempt, and this analysis justifies our belief that we misread.

The second idea: that the film is a political drama. This is done moderately well. Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) can be quite menacing, with her fingers analogized to scissors, cutting the strings of her victims. Shia LeBeouf is great as Clodio, petty, boisterous, but charismatic.

But... Platinum's motivation is that she wants Cesar. Clodio just doesn't like Cesar. Nothing fuels these conflicts. And Cesar does nothing, he invents, then finds an obstacle, complains that he's a tortured genius, then moves on. So this idea is toothless, and I think Coppola fucked up here unless he wanted to stay on the "bigger picture", of the regressive, the human, the sinful holding back progress.

By the way, if Cesar is genuinely removing people from their homes, I'm with the protestors, I mean, who doesn't deserve to have a roof over their heads. If Cesar is meant to be infamous city planner Robert Moses, Coppola did a bad job putting a brighter light on Moses' deeds i.e. putting poor people on the streets to make highways.

The third: that the film is about an artist's struggle. Again, the dialogue is bad. It's crazy bad. And Coppola's depiction of these robots falling in love is so routine. He's tormented. She's open. He needs her. Without her he is not creative. They fall in love. She's pregnant. Her father disapproves. Blah blah blah. So this idea is poorly executed. But by Jove Giancarlo Esposito is so good at depicting the disapproving dad. He's so human when he tries to convince Cesar to give up on his daughter, and he's so humane as he interacts with his granddaughter.

And now we're at our last idea, that the film is a fairytale. Or a satire. Take your pick.

Because the satire is by far the most effective part of the film. I fucking love the whole Vestal Virgin bit. Again, another failed reference to the Roman Republic: the virgins are religious figures, not pop singers. In the film, the virgins are all blue-eyed blonde white-skinned pop singers, and their one song, which is awesome, is about how they pledged to be pure. It's amazing. Vesta Sweetwater literally has a dress that is see-through, and she proudly proclaims "You can see right through me!" right after she and her virgins gyrate their hips on the floor as old men pledge to give them money.

Clodio has a rally where his wife Clodio Pulcher, played by "Saturday Night Live" actress Chloe Fineman, says something to the effect, forgive me if I misremember, how it's great her husband doesn't commit to any actual campaign pledges.

Then there's the entirety of Aubrey Plaza's character, who got her name of Wow Platinum at a "recruiting office" at a Pennsylvania train station.

Surrounding this is Cesar serenading the audience with speeches of timelessness and the good of humanity, in genuinely beautiful, sci-fi appropriate settings. Cesar, here, is less hero and more messiah.

I think if Coppola commited to this one and only one idea, Cesar being a messianic figure, though himself flawed and burdened by his mortality, the movie would be great. It justifies the film's surreal sequences, of Cesar longing for his dead wife, of Cesar's agony in terms of his drug addiction and fame, the utopia of Cesar's vision, and the uglier, more realistic aspects of the film as greed and lust. They make perfect contrasts.

But I suspect this is an incorrect critique, because the madness of Coppola's world comes from its minutiae, that Cesar is Caesar, that Cicero is Cicero, that New Rome is New York City. The wind in Coppola's sails is the fact that the film is meant to be an indictment and a warning to his beloved country. Should we discourage Coppola from commenting on politics when the absurdity, the inanity, the anger in his film comes from his real life opinions, muddled as they are? I genuinely don't have an answer, but Coppola successfully, and this is his only success, proves one of the film's conclusions: that as messy as it is to implement our ideals, we must do so regardless, for this is where utopia starts.

Perhaps this is an idea of Coppola's: the film is not a reproduction of the Catilinian Conspiracy, but an alternate version where the tensions between these two ways of thinking, Cicero's and Catiline's, resolve for the better of humankind. Perhaps.

Here's the thing: we're at the precipice where the art to be made now looks like "Megalopolis", art that is commentary about the country. Whether the US is in trouble is not the point, what is evident is the intensifying "culture war", its notion that with it is a kind of decay of the country, and how people have assimilated its arguments into their lives. I legitimately think no one has tackled this issue well, and believe you me, we can probably think of several attempts in the last few years to write about this genuinely major part of our current human experience. I bet a lot of novelists have tried their hands at this, but none are as ambitious as Coppola's effort. God bless Francis Ford Coppola; art's story is a lot of artists failing but failing big so as to inform other artists what they'll do.

I feared being bored by this movie. I didn't exactly hate-watch it, but going by the reviews I had a realistic expectation that the film would be longwinded. I'm being real: the two hours moved fast. To be fair, I have watched so many bad films in the form of anime. You have not seen the bottom of filmmaking, the bottom of humanity until you've watched anime, and I've seen "Zaat" and "Troll 2", and I've subjected myself to hours - hours! - of many, many...many...bad series and films. Part of the film's swiftness came from my confusion at its make and not being sure what'll come next. Another part comes from my being interested in how art gets made, and hoo boy, was this a work out, figuring out what I was misunderstanding and what was mere inability on the film makers' part.

I'm not sure if I can recommend the film, as a result of that. It's definitely not a film a general audience will like, though there are excellent clips to be made of it. But it's really not that bad. If I were talking to myself, I would wholeheartedly recommend it. It's the kind of art I'd like to make, though not exactly.