Megalopolis Review

One of the last grand gestures of a great. Say what you want and inevitably will about Megalopolis, these are rare moments in the movies of now. Do not use it as an excuse to exploit or defend the many shortcomings of this Francis Ford Coppola feature, but do use it as a chance to live out and through one of the final beats of the legendary drum. Funded by wine money and guided by a creative urgency which got him through Apocalypse Now, Coppola charges through this ensemble cast with big ideas and bold assertions. It is nigh impossible to consider Megalopolis without the broad strokes which led to its making. Roman influence and adaptation, the fall of an empire in the face of a new idea, a fresh beginning. But the old hands which make this feature so frightening, so impactful, are the very same people who are toppled on screen, who are met with such pushback. A gamble from Coppola. Should we be surprised? 

Contain your excitement. From the sweaty Shia LaBeouf to a vacant expression looming on the face of Adam Driver, who has enjoyed an all-star lineup of works with the greats over the last few years, Metropolis is a mess. Mess is mess, no matter what charm you find in it. Try as you might to see through the rubble, the time freezes and the political playground, Coppola makes a considerable mess of all these moving parts. Anybody would. There is a tenacity to Megalopolis. An insanity which engulfs even the describable and most obvious of moving parts. Giancarlo Esposito would thrive if it were not for every scene needing something, anything, of theatrics. Whether it is the point or not, to have LaBeouf’s Pulcher swinging through the rickety bridges, to have Driver’s Cesar quoting William Shakespeare, it is the luxury of indulgence.  

Having a legacy to explore is a rarity and to do it on these terms is admirable, but also insane in a tremendously trivial way. What little of the story can be made out from under the littering of familiar faces, of cutaways to the people this story is poised on, is futile. Cesar is built with such an unwavering positivity that the outcry and the reasonings against him are understandable, but brushed under the carpet. An act in the now against an act of the future is a strange stance for Coppola to take given his best works took some time to be adjusted to, to be appreciated. There was nothing immediate about those works and still, there is nothing immediate about this. If you can get over the often-erratic framing choices, of the wilder camera angles, then there is much to love about Megalopolis. 

This is a film rich in context, richer still in character study and its obvious connotations to the empire of eras ago. Opposing forces will join when both feel threatened and the build to follow in the second and final act comes not from a person but an opportunity given to all. Megalopolis is scared of its own shadow, too heavy on detail and yet for all those commentaries and swirling sense of adaptations of the old era, it feels obvious in spots. Beauty is not expensive to those who can afford to wait. Coppola is not exactly hiding this, though, splitting lines from the Catilinarian orations and blurring them with more recent historical events like the storming of the Capital. It does not so much come together as it does continually crash into the other moving parts, the explosion impressive but the pieces, once picked through, are nothing more than ego-driven nods to the intellect of the man writing this wild and weird script.