“Megalopolis” is the Kamala Harris of prestige arthouse cinema. The monstrously ambitious big-budget science fiction/fantasy drama, written and directed by one of cinema’s greatest voices, is intended as an immensely earnest, optimistic, and joyful art. Still, when it comes to matters of substance, it’s awkward and bizarre, feeling obtuse, headache-inducing, and dependent on vibes to keep it moving forward — while also being defended by a vociferous terminally online fanbase.
It’s appropriate that such a movie would be released just 39 days before a contentious election. However, this is certainly not new territory for director Francis Ford Coppola, the progressive maverick behind cinematic masterpieces like “The Godfather,” “The Conversation,” and “Apocalypse Now.” His films are well known for excoriating the concept of the American Dream and blasting American foreign policy in Vietnam. As film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum points out, his populist anti-corporate passion project “Tucker: The Man And His Dream” was released to coincide with Michael Dukakis’ campaign in the 1988 election against George H.W. Bush.
“Megalopolis” cannot be accused of being shy about its politics. It is explicitly a film about building a better future and the flawed process great men must use to build a better society against the forces of managerial centrism and fascist backsliding. It is a monstrously ambitious work if only because it is throwing a thousand ideas per minute at its audience and asking them to mull over every one of them. It’s something you either love or hate, which is reflected in its startlingly low $4 million gross for its opening weekend.
The full title — Francis Ford Coppola Presents “Megalopolis: A Fable” — says a lot about its premise and how it wants you to engage with it. It is explicitly trying to spin a fantasy yarn with a blunt message and rambles like those from a schizophrenic hippie grandfather.
Set in the fictional city of New Rome, the film follows three characters — Cicero, Claudio, and Caesar — as they attempt to shape the future of a declining decadent American metropolis. The movie’s allusions to the fall of the Roman Republic are extremely on the nose, with characters attending pagan wedding ceremonies and chariot races at Madison Square Garden. Effectively, it’s a loose retelling of the Roman Catilinarian conspiracy, told through the lenses of technocratic urban planning and progressive utopian futurism.
Caesar is an ambitious city planner who has set his heart on reshaping a large portion of the city as a monument to humanity using a newly discovered building material called Megalon. His plan to build “Megalopolis” is opposed in equal measure by the city’s centrist Mayor Cicero, who sees the project as an ambitious potential failure and waste of valuable city resources. As they fight it out, they grapple with intermediary challenges from Cicero’s lascivious daughter falling in love with Caesar, a lurid television presenter ambitiously marrying the city’s lead banker to advance her power, and Claudio’s attempts to spark a populist revolution comprised of Neo-Confederates, Skinhead Nazis, and populist patriots waving Betsy Ross flags.
Minor spoiler: The movie’s final shot is just a title card that says, “I pledge allegiance to our human family and to all the species that we protect. One Earth, indivisible, with long life, education, and justice for all.”
The film’s message is almost the literal embodiment of Kamala Harris’s much-mocked sentiment of “what can be unburdened by what has been.” It’s a fable about the joys of leaping forward into the unknown with abandon and knowing beyond hope you’ll land on your feet.
Trying to classify a story this blunt and oblique in terms as simple as “good” or “bad” defies all logic. “Megalopolis” isn’t either. Film students are still going to be inflicted with the film in a century trying to understand it alongside Bergman’s “Persona” and Godard’s “Breathless.” It’s a furious montage of sound, images, and Shakespeare/Marcus Aurelius quotes that overwhelms the senses with its implications, and that’s before factoring it that its also technically a time travel movie.
It’s been compared to the “Star Wars” prequels, “Matrix Resurrections,” “Sucker Punch,” and the collective films of Neil Breen, which have dedicated audiences despite their severe flaws. Its performances can best be described as Wiseauian or Breen-esque, but Adam Driver commits to the role with abandon and gives one of the most bizarrely compelling performances in contemporary cinema. Its CGI is intermittently expensive-looking but is also Brechtian in its obviousness. It wants you to know it’s fake. It’s clear everything in the film is Coppola’s vision, and your ability to appreciate what he’s trying to articulate comes down to how much you respect its earnestness.
The 85-year-old Coppola certainly wants “Megalopolis” to be his comeback film — which is particularly notable for a director who hasn’t directed a positively received film since 1997’s “The Rainmaker.” Despite self-financing a handful of recent low-budget indie films like “Twixt,” “Tetro,” and “Youth Without Youth,” his filmmaking glory days are well behind him, but he wants another chance to hit an ambitious homerun. He’s been sitting on the concept for “Megalopolis” since 1977 and never had a chance to film it.
Coppola remains a stubbornly independent maverick after six decades of filmmaking, even against his fellow progressives. He refinanced and bet a $200 million stake of his ownership in his Coppola Winery in 2021 to invest in the film’s production budget. As Rolling Stone reports, he even went out of his way to hire “canceled” actors like Jon Voight and Shia LaBeouf to avoid being written off as “some woke Hollywood production.”
If anything, the film’s arrogance makes it attractive and worth talking about. As New Yorker critic Richard Brody writes, the movie is an act and celebration of sheer hubris. “Two things keep this contrivance held together in tenuous balance: a clear dramatic framework and Coppola’s sheer strength of feeling.” It’s a movie that shatters with the lightest touch, filled with deep contradictions and logical holes. But as Rosenbaum writes, the film “lands in our laps both happier and dumber for its lack of inhibitions.”
In a vibes-based year, “Megalopolis” is the most vibes-based film. It feels like 2024. It’s hard not to respect it. It succeeds at being infectiously joyful.
Tyler Hummel is a Nashville-based freelance journalist, a College Fix Fellow, and a member of the Music City Film Critics Association. He has contributed to The Dispatch, The New York Sun, Hollywood in Toto, The Pamphleteer, Law and Liberty, Main Street Nashville, North American Anglican, Living Church, and Geeks Under Grace.
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