Directing: C
Acting: C+
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C
Special Effects: B-

Undoubtedly there is a niche group of people who are convinced Megalopolis is a crowning work of staggering genius. Those people are wrong.

Here is how I would characterize my experience of Megalopolis: it was 138 minutes of me having no idea what the hell is going on. I went in fully expecting it to be a mess, after endless press coverage of writer-director Francis Ford Coppola self-financing the film to the tune of $120 million and mixed responses at film festivals. But, I thought: it might have some redeeming value. The cast, the acting, the visuals, the production design. To one degree or another, all of these things disappoint.

Megalopolis does have a few images I very much enjoyed, at least in isolation, taken out of a context I could make absolutely no sense of. My favorite is an old satellite crashing in pieces onto Manhattan, a beautiful image that culminates in an overhead shot of nothing more than dust plumes puffing into a single intersection. The fact that this is not the kind of movie Coppola intended to make notwithstanding, it has the promise of a visual thrill that then delivers nothing. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a ruined orgasm. Given that the narrative moves forward with zero clarity on exactly what kind of effect this event had on the city, that description could apply to the movie as a whole.

The setting, incidentally, is never identified as New York, even though every image of the city is very clearly that. Instead, this story takes place in “New Rome,” the center of an empire on the verge of collapse, images of architectural columns and modern iterations of coliseum entertainment. We see Shia LaBeouf in a toga (much of the time, inexplicably, dressed as a woman, his character treating the act as a kind of lark), and Aubrey Plaza literally lounging in opulent surroundings and feeding herself grapes. Meanwhile, we get sporadic glimpses of unrest around the city, police cars passing by with “NRPD” stenciled on their sides.

I could never quite ascertain whether “New Rome” was supposed to be a country or a city. At one point it’s referred to as the “greatest country the world has ever known,” but we only ever see city leadership: the Mayor (Giancarlo Esposito), facing off against his powerful rival, architect and Chairman of the Design Authority of New Rome, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver). Is New Rome a city-state, or what? Some “empire.”

Coppola leans so hard on this, “a fable”—that being literally the subtitle of the film—being Shakespearean that, in a very odd press conference scene early on in the film, Cesar Catilina delivers Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” monologue in its entirety, playing it as an amusing performance for the press. The problem with Coppola’s script overall, combined with the entire movie’s fever-dream editing, is that everything happening is seen at a distance, a peculiar remove. On the surface, Megalopolis plays like a cross between Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil and Damien Chazelle’s 2022 film Babylon; beneath the surface, it seems to aspire to be a spiritual sequel, or the 21st-century answer to Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, only stripped of any recognizable substance.

There’s a lot of familial relationships in Megalopolis, complete with offhand suggestions of incestuousness. John Voight plays Hamilton Crassus III, the city’s resident multibillionaire and Cesar’s uncle. LaBeouf’s Clodio Pulcher is Crassus’s son, and Cesar’s troublemaking cousin, trying to stir up unrest around the city (complete with an awkward cut to a Black family, one of them stoically raising a fist to one of Clodio’s pandering speeches). Nathalie Emmanuel plays Julia Cicero, the Mayor’s daughter who winds up as Cesar’s love interest.

When I see a movie like this and all the talent involved, I can’t help but wonder: did they just want to be able to say they worked with the Francis Ford Coppola? Even though he hasn’t produced a masterwork in 45 years? This is the guy who gave us The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now—but he also directed Robin Williams as an overgrown man-baby in Jack, and I don’t care what anyone says, 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is unwatchable.

Even three decades after that, we still get the likes of Laurence Fishburne as a driver and assistant; Dustin Hoffman as the Mayor’s fixer; Aubrey Plaza as a TV newsmagazine host named Wow Platinum; and Jason Schwartzman as a member of the Mayor’s entourage in Megalopolis. Some of their comparatively limited screen time is amusing; most of it feels like a waste. They all move about in a hyper-stylized world that feels rendered on a limited VFX budget, interacting according to a plot that feels as though it’s been poured into a blender.

I haven’t even mentioned that Cesar has invented an ultra-sustainable material called Megalon, which he’s been granted license to use to rebuild the city (get it?). Somehow, it also grants Cesar the ability to control space and time. How that fits neatly into his dream of converting the city (country??) into a utopia, I couldn’t tell you; Megalopolis lost me from there. It did, however, allow for a lovely romantic image of a couple embracing on suspended building beams, a dropped bouquet of flowers suspended in midair just below them. If only I could harness Cesar’s power and harness that one moment, and stretch its impact across the rest of its utterly convoluted runtime.

*One moment in time can be very misleading.*

Overall: C+