Megalopolis (2024)

“I’m sure I have missed a whole bunch of opportunities and I am going to miss others, but I caught a lot of them too. In the end it’s about how many I catch, not how many I lose.”

This quote from Francis Ford Coppola is from the film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, a film by his late wife, Eleanor, of just over sixty years (!). If he were an MLB hitter, Coppola would be a slugger hitter. He never would be one interested in just getting on base: He is swinging for the fences…at the back of the stadium.

Obviously, this has worked in his favor. No other director dominated the 1970s like he did: all four of the films he made were nominated for Best Picture, two of them won, and all are masterpieces (for those who don’t know, they were the first two Godfather films, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. But it has worked as badly against him (I have not seen all of his films, but 1996’s Jack does come to mind.) This also has not come without cost to him behind the scenes as well (the aforementioned Hearts of Darkness showed how Apocalypse Now may have had the most troubled of shoots in the history of cinema.) Still, his ambition as a filmmaker is almost second to none, and is willing to do anything to get his vision on screen, which brings us to his passion project, Megalopolis.

From what I have read, this has been in his mind for decades (it was in pre-production at one point in the early 2000s but was understandably shelved after the 9-11 attacks). It does not take much to see how much earnestness Coppola displays on screen…yet the amount of ideas he is throwing are too many to digest. 

The plot is…well, I will do all I can to explain it the best I can. In the future, New York is now New Rome. The city is not in the futuristic sense as much as it is on the eve of it (there are still cars and what not). The man trying to change all that is Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), a beyond brilliant architect with the ability to stop time. Like all genius’s, he is both loved and hated. The finder of a new building material (Megalon), his vision is under question mainly by Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Complicating the matter is that the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), has developed feelings for Cesar.

This is just the tip of the iceberg with the cast. There is Cesar’s Uncle Hamilton (Jon Voight), who is the father of Cesar’s jealous son Clodio. Laurence Fishburne is Fundi Romaine, Cesar’s driver (as well as the film’s narrator). Cesar’s mom is played by Talia Shire (Coppola’s sister), while Shire’s son Jason Schwartzman is a part of the Mayor’s entourage. Grace Vanderhaal stars as a teen pop idol named Vesta Sweetwater. Dustin Hoffman (who I have not seen on the big screen in nearly two decades) is the Mayor’s fixer. Finally (and my favorite performance of the bunch) is Aubrey Plaza as a TV reporter named Wow Platinum (you read that right, and I am all here for it). Her character is not one to show her cards.

Of course, all the performers are not giving bad performances (although LaBouf is surely making a choice with what he is doing), since no one would want to do that in front of Coppola. The clear issue is simply that the film is trying to do too much at once. My hats off to anyone who could understand all that was happening on screen with just one viewing.

Parents, the film does earn its R rating, with sexual content, swearing, some violence, and a whole lot of drug use. So yeah, don’t let anyone under High School see it.

All that said, just because the movie is not necessarily good does not at all make it boring. Visually, what Coppola puts on screen does engage the mind and gives a good amount of images you will remember long after. I will go on the record and say I am willing to watch it a second time.

And, as one character states, “ True artists never lose power over time.”

Overall: