Megalopolis Is a Mega Mess
If nothing else, Megalopolis is a whole lot of movie. But not in a good way.
Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating passion project—in development since the 1970s—is a movie of sprawling ambition: Megalopolis gestures at ideas and concepts ranging from cultural decay to public debt to architecture to zoning. It’s a movie about the slow, sad death of a once-great republic. Yes, Coppola, the director of The Godfather, still believes in America. But he’s not sure that America believes in itself, so he’s made a movie that seems to want to take on the entire nature of art, society, and human existence, and, in the process, demand that humans reach for more.
Surely, it declares, there must be something better—something more beautiful and more inspiring, something more worthy of epochs of evolution and human struggle—than the way we live now?
If Megalopolis is any indication, the answer, sadly, is no.
The movie is ambitious, yes, but in a way that’s so clumsy as to be comical. Characters speak in elliptical, pseudo-Shakespearean runes so absurdly self-serious they sound like dramatic readings of tweets. The movie’s story is a thicket of opaque schemes and subplots that are nearly impossible to follow. There are striking images, but on the whole the movie’s slick digital sheen makes it look like it was shot on an old iPhone. It’s a movie that wants to provoke awe, but it’s more likely to provoke an LOL. After watching this movie, you won’t believe in a better world. You’ll just be scratching your head.
Megalopolis? More like, MegaFlopThisIs.
Set in a retro-futuristic version of New York City called New Rome, the movie sometimes plays like an elaborate stunt designed to prove that, yes, men really do think about the Roman Empire all the time.
New Rome is declining, decaying, coming apart, saddled with debt and fiscal problems. Yes, this is a movie premised on problems with public finance. No surprise, then, that it makes about as much sense as a city budget hearing.
To solve New Rome’s woes, brilliant architect Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) is given a federal license to clear the o
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