Megalopolis is a ghastly mess

When you hear the name Francis Ford Coppola you probably think of a man who has had a profound impact on cinema. Considering the Godfather and Apocalypse Now you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. Seeing the cast of Megalopolis you might also think that this could have the potential to be his best film to date. Jon Voight, Aubrey Plaza, Adam Driver, Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Fishburne, Giancarlo Esposito… the list goes on. However, after watching Megalopolis you might more realistically start to think that his early work was a fluke, he’d started to lose his mind or that perhaps he’d lost touch with what makes cinema engaging.

The film, which is said to have been 40 years in the making, is a scrambling, messy, egotistical, obnoxious crawl through a hyper-stylised America as if it were a parallel universe version of Rome during the fall of the Empire. Characters with Roman names like Cesar, Cicero and Crassus take what could have been a subtle metaphor for the fall of modern America and instead beat you over the head with it until you wish someone would just throw you to the lions.

To really spice things up, Aubrey Plaza plays a character who is (legitimately) called Wow Platinum. I must have missed the chapter on her in Y13 Classics. I don’t know about 40 years in the making, but it certainly felt like 40 years in the viewing. As the film drooled on over its nearly 140-minute runtime, I began to ask myself: who is Coppola, who also wrote this punishment of a script,  making this for? Certainly not an audience. Perhaps for himself, or for his own ego?

Nevertheless, as there often are with films that are obsessed with how smart they sound, a small number of the audience applauded at the end. The facetious part of me (which is rearing its head during this review) wanted to point at them and say,“Tell me why you are clapping? What was good about it?” A celebrated name attached to a film doesn’t mean you have to enjoy it to appear cultured. In fairness, I would also like to mention, soapbox movie rant aside, I’m well aware that my opinion about things isn’t fact. The clappers may have genuinely enjoyed the movie, I just personally find this almost impossible to understand.

The dialogue was so superficially stylised it was like watching a Shakespeare play without any of the tension, pathos or character development. In fact, it was so Shakespearean that at times characters broke into full-on monologues, and as much as it’s impressive to watch an actor of Adam Driver’s calibre perform Hamlet’s famous, ‘To be or not to be’ monologue, when that was the only part of the movie that had decent writing, you wonder why Coppola didn’t just make a Shakespeare film. At least when the bard doesn’t understand subtlety we give him a break as he was writing with a quill.

Megalopolis is not sexy enough to be sexy, not funny enough to be fun and doesn’t really have anything new or interesting to say at all, and the fact it feels like it’s saying it in the slowest way possible certainly doesn’t help. Some of the editing decisions felt like an intern had been asked to make an “arthouse” film but had handed the responsibility off to ChatGPT. Oh, also Driver’s character can sometimes control time for some fucking reason.

There is some decent cinematography at play here and the score is gorgeous if predictable for the genre. Fans of Coppola might love this, and people who definitely want to impress their friends with how avant-garde their film tastes are might enjoy acting shocked and horrified when their “stupid friends” don’t enjoy this “masterpiece”. The only saving grace is Jon Voight having such a genuinely good time as a drunk old man. Personally, after watching this self-serving, congratulatory piece of monotony, I think I’d rather watch Mark Wahlberg hang out with giant robots while Michael Bay yells “action!”

+ Screening from Thursday September 26 at a megaplex near you.