Megalopolis, explained as best we can
One mortgaged winery, $136 million budget, several allegations of non-consensual kissing, and a crossdressing Shia LaBeouf later, Megalopolis is finally here — and it appears to be a “mega-flopolis.”
The film, a perplexing, oversaturated modern riff on the waning days of the Roman Republic — if Rome were New York City by way of Baz Luhrmann and Fellini’s Satyricon — made an astoundingly low $4 million over its opening weekend. Though that might speak primarily to the public appetite for a CGI-laden Shakespearean drama without the benefit of Shakespeare, it’s a number likely assisted by the confusion and division surrounding the film. Even for the notably demanding director Francis Ford Coppola, known for intense sets that lead to masterpieces like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now as well as critically acclaimed flops like The Conversation and his musical One From the Heart, Megalopolis has been accompanied by an unusual degree of chaos and controversy. As Coppola has recounted many times, he’s been trying to make Megalopolis for decades, and ultimately wound up financing it by borrowing against his own fortune — a costly risk that may now never pay off.
Yet after all of that hoopla, even the film’s arrival in theaters may not satisfactorily answer the basic question: What even is Megalopolis, anyway?
Here’s an attempt to answer that question — though as with all things related to this film, opinions may vary considerably about Megalopolis, what it’s aiming for, and what, if anything, it achieves.
Megalopolis is Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead with a dash of Inception and a huge helping of theatre camp
Megalopolis stars Adam Driver as a futuristic architect named Cesar Catilina. Giancarlo Esposito plays his rival, Cicero, the mayor of New Rome. Cicero’s daughter Julia (Game of Thrones’s Nathalie Emmanuel), who falls for Catilina, waffles between the two (even after Catalina tells the socialite to “go back to the cluuuuub“). She may or may not hold the secret to mastering the “megalon,” a golden glowy element that looks like gold foil but is, we’re told, made of space-time itself. Using megalon, Catilina wants to build a version of New Rome that he dubs an immortal school-city.
His vision ultimately turns out to be just a slightly more sci-fi version of the High Line, but it’s apparently enough to usher in the utopia of his dreams. (It also helps that he’s motivated by the memory of his late wife, whose death he may have hastened with his obsessiveness, a la Inception, despite an official ruling of death by suicide.) Also like Christopher Nolan’s Inception, architecture seems to be a metaphor for movie-making — Catilina as a tortured, misunderstood artist who decides to name his son Francis.
Though this basic plot feels swiped from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, in execution the story is full of oddities — Driver can stop time, except when he can’t? — and curiosities; at many showings, a live performer interacts with the screen, lip-syncing along with an off-screen figure. Though the all-star cast is huge, many of the characters seem to have very little to do with the plot. They seem to primarily be window-dressing or an excuse for Coppola to cast many members of his own family, ranging from nephew Jason Schwartzman to several young grandchildren. Like Kevin Costner’s Horizon, another $100 million auteur box office failure, Megalopolis features an odd mix of deliberately elevated language and literary allusions: Driver makes his entrance reciting two-thirds of Hamlet’s soliloquy, apparently purely for drama. Julia and her father battle-slash-communicate using Marcus Aurelius quotes.
The story, such as it is, unfolds against a surprisingly lackluster CGI city whose skylines and blurred edges aren’t quite enough to convey the soaring futuristic vision Coppola clearly had in mind. By contrast, the crowded ensemble scenes and orgiastic, wild, decadent party life of the streets (embodied by a woozy Aubrey Plaza sleeping her way to the top) feel so Felliniesque it’s hard to take it as anything but pastiche. Overall, the concept might have worked much better as an anime — it’s less like a fully coherent narrative and more like a fun project for theater kids and their friends who recently got into computer animation.
The making of Megalopolis was as over-the-top as the film itself
2024 brought an onslaught of weird Megalopolis news in the long build-up to the film itself. First, in May, there was a deep-dive Guardian investigation into the production. Timed to coincide with the film’s debut at Cannes, where it was debuting without a distributor, the piece depicted a troubled set. Numerous anonymous crew members belittled Coppola’s directorial sensibilities and claimed to be baffled by his inability to work well with CGI; at one point, Coppola reportedly told a crew member, “How can you figure out what Megalopolis looks like when I don’t even know what Megalopolis looks like?”
This specific CGI-induced crisis is the kind of thing that many filmmakers angst over (Christopher Nolan again comes to mind), so it isn’t as though the Guardian report alone was enough to cast doubt on the film. However, the report also contained allegations that he behaved inappropriately toward many women on set by making the rounds of the topless women in one elaborate scene and reportedly trying to kiss them. These are allegations Coppola has partially denied, admitting that he kissed the women but denying there was anything untoward — as he was directing, he reportedly announced to the set that “if I come up to you and kiss you, just know it’s solely for my pleasure.” It’s unclear how that statement clarified anything for the actors on set; it doesn’t exactly create the image of a trouble-free production helmed by a focused, clear-sighted director. According to the Guardian, the now-85-year-old auteur would also allegedly smoke weed in his trailer before emerging to announce a brand-new scene to shoot.
Shortly after the Guardian story came the film’s polarized reception at Cannes. Though its director received a wild ovation from an enthusiastic audience made up of many people who were directly involved in the movie (another Horizon parallel), this was countered by critics who called the film, generously, “absolute madness” and “a totally bonkers experiment,” or, less generously, “a head-wrecking abomination” consisting of “138 stultifying minutes of ill-conceived themes, half-finished scenes, nails-along-the-blackboard performances, word-salad dialogue and ugly visuals all seemingly in search of a story that isn’t there.” Yikes.
Finally, in July, we got the trailer, which immediately drew criticism for using quotes from critics about Coppola’s previous works, not about Megalopolis. While audiences were still debating whether this was some sort of intentional meta-commentary, the trailer was quickly recalled by Lionsgate, which apologized sincerely to Coppola for what was apparently a genuine mistake.
All of this led up to the resounding question of what sort of a ride we were in for. Even after the film’s release, that’s still not entirely clear — but it’s definitely anything but boring.
What does it all mean?!
Coppola has claimed that Megalopolis is an exploration of and a warning about an America on the brink of fascism, but the film, despite its clunky Roman metaphors and heavy-handed satire of the modern media, obfuscates that message in plenty of ways. For starters, Coppola seems to think — and Megalopolis repeatedly seems to imply, however inadvertently — that the greatest risk of fascism comes from the politically correct, insurgent left, rather than from oppressive systems. The film instead seems to view a wealthy upper class as a potentially benevolent force, and Coppola has stated that he deliberately cast “canceled” actors (like LaBeouf) in order to avoid the appearance of being “woke.” LaBeouf plays an opportunistic figure who takes up populist causes for his own manipulative ends, all while intermittently wearing a dress and a rat-tail and cozying up to power; it’s all equal parts boorish and incoherent.
Then there’s Cesar Catilina himself, the nephew of a powerful billionaire (Jon Voigt), who despite nominally claiming to work for the people, pursues power and his vision for the masses with pure Randian entitlement. Despite, or more likely because, of his being named Cesar, the film ultimately endorses his righteousness without any self-reflection. The film ends with Catilina winning his battle with the mayor to usher in the city he wants to build — but his former enemy stands by his side, grandfather to his only son, and the family portrait is accompanied by an overtly creepy chant of schoolchildren pledging to build an America dedicated to education and opportunity. Politically, the message is fully muddled.
Beyond that flimsy moral, it’s unclear where Megalopolis’s primary claim to genius rests. Lots and lots of movies have been made about a lone hero lost in a dystopian New York. (The Michael Keaton subgenre alone!) The idea that what the city really needs is a new, futuristic architectural vision isn’t new, either; it’s the central theme of Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece Metropolis, as well as the film adaptation of The Fountainhead. The 1927 silent classic East Side, West Side finds the main character, just as in Megalopolis, monologuing to his starstruck girlfriend about erecting immortal skyscrapers.
Unlike East Side, West Side, however, Megalopolis wasn’t filmed on location in New York, but rather in Atlanta, where Coppola was apparently so dissatisfied with the accommodations that he bought and renovated an entire motel to house his family during filming. The film’s opening weekend box office might barely cover the cost of that purchase.
This contradiction is one of many that makes Megalopolis feel, for all the money and time and clear passion that went into it, like a rough draft of a film that needed several more revisions to find a coherent thesis. Despite a number of head-turning ideas and moments of sheer theatricality, the film gives way more often than not to bloat and incoherence. Is it an interesting sort of incoherence? Well, yes, if you enjoy seeing movies ironically, as many people do.
Still, amid all the scandal and CGI, there’s a real sense of sadness here. This may well be Coppola’s last film, so watching it for the lulz probably isn’t what most movie buffs had on their 2024 agenda.