Megalopolis (2024)

 'Megalopolis' is bad. Shockingly, pedanticly, even amateurisly bad. That Francis Ford Coppla, responsible for 'The Godfather', 'The Conversation' and 'Apocalypse Now' could write, direct and produce this... well cognitive decline comes to mind, but also the dangers many creative people can get into when no one is restraining them. 

Coppola first started working on the ideas for 'Megalopolis' shortly after finishing 'Apocalypse Now', and has been tinkering with it for roughly 45 years. Never able to attract studio interest, Coppala self financed this $120 million behemoth, selling a winery to be able to afford it. He assembled a truly impressive ensemble cast ranging form old hands like Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, to newer, less conventional casting choices like Shia LaBeouf and Aubrey Plaza, the latter one of the few performers in the piece to come out of this disaster undeminished.

A parable, as the opening credits inform us, it is set in an alternate version of New York City called New Rome, and the Roman touches are present throughout the film in the form of names, costumes and even plot points. Storys of ancient Rome and Shakespeare are major influences here. While there are many plots going on, the principle one revolves around a riverly between a brilliant architect played by Adam Driver, and the city's mayor played by expert villian Giancarlo Esposito, one further complicated when Esposito's daughter Nathalie Emmaual starts dating Driver. Also Driver has the ability to stop time, and the new environmentaly friendly and supper adaptable building material he developed was fashioned out of materializing his late wife's despair. Or something like that, this movie is really weird.

Coppala seems to see his movie as delivering profound and important warnings about the dangers of environmental degradation, run away captlilism and political polarization. However his treatment of these subjects are very surfacy and uninsightful. The film is convinced of its own greatness, which to put it nicely is unearned. It wants to think of its self as vaugly populist, but shows no intreast in the proletariat, all of its characters are elites and in a particularly pronounced example of tonedefness has as it's ultimate moral, that the good elites will save us from the bad elites. 'Megalopolis' is a mess.

That being said at least 'Megalopolis' is an interesting mess, a passion project that is both patronizing and, as far as I can tell, completely sincere. I was almost never bored, it's a pretty entertaining train wreck with some bonkers moments which I rather enjoyed. As the film ended I had a big grin on my face, what I had just seen should not exist, so I found real amusement in the fact that through shear  hutzpah it does. *1/2