Megalopolis Is a Problematic, Massive Flop. You Might Just Love It Anyway.

Despite director Francis Ford Coppola having spent more than $100 million of his own money and working on it for nearly 50 years, Megalopolis is an insanely bloated disaster that looks like it was made on the cheap and rushed into theaters to beat a looming deadline. It is not a good movie. But if you appreciate the director’s willingness to risk looking like a pompous lunatic as evidenced by previous divisive entries in his filmography (such as Apocalypse Now and Bram Stoker’s Dracula), go ahead and buy tickets while you still can.

Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), a visionary inventor and architect in an alternate history version of a Roman Republic-descended New York City called New Rome, possesses a superpower around which entire movie franchises could be built: He can stop time at will. And yet he uses this gift for nothing more interesting than to drunkenly amuse himself, to stand dramatically on rooftops without the risk of falling and to impress Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), the beautiful daughter of his rival, Mayor Franklyn Cicero.

Cesar is more interested in developing a futuristic city with moving sidewalks and bubble-based public transit using his radical new building material, Megalon, a bio-adaptive (?) matter consisting of golden-hued CGI he religiously believes will replace the steel and concrete worshipped by his decadent idiot challengers.

Oh, and Megalon can also repair flesh and bone damage, though there is an awkward period during which the healing body part consists of yellow metallic PlayStation 3-cutscene-quality computer animation surfacing.

Though Cesar all but squanders his ability to freeze time, he is distressed for the few minutes of screen time when he seems to lose this parlor-trick superpower.

Watching this spectacular, overstuffed movie in which men have barely metaphorical dick-measuring contests while vacuous horny women connive to steal their fortunes, it’s tempting to psychoanalyze the 85-year-old filmmaker’s preoccupation with wrestling the passage of time into submission.

The urge becomes irresistible the more one knows about the history of the project, which Coppola first conceived in the late 1970s and which he has started to develop but then abandoned at various stages for various reasons over the decades since. A lawsuit filed by an extra alleges that during the interminable nightclub party (or “bacchanal,” because Rome) scene, the director got up and wandered into the shots to kiss and hug women, and a pair of videos sent to Variety show the old man shuffling around doing just that.

A source told the Hollywood trade magazine that the director said he was trying to get them “in the mood.” If the mood he was going for was “trying not to show how creeped out you are by a powerful, wealthy octogenarian,” well, you can’t say it doesn’t fit the movie. Coppola sued Variety for libel, downplaying the physical contact and referring to an NDA signed by sources, and claims he was just trying to be encouraging. He seeks $15 million, which would be more than twice the movie’s likely box office total or just under a tenth of its budget.

There are intentionally onscreen old men embarrassing themselves with party girls young enough to be their grandchildren, too. Jon Voight plays Crassus, a raging, lusting, pasty, tubby, mush-brained, power-crazed villain with comically bizarre hair who ends up with the sharp-elbowed, decades-younger TV journalist/gold digger Wow Platinum, a blonde Aubrey Plaza. (“Gold digger” might be redundant, though, as it could apply to most of the female characters.)

The Crassus role seems like a prank the liberal director is playing on the outspoken Trumpist actor, a joke that appears to go over Voight’s head. Another possible bit of cleverness Voight shows no sign of having caught: At one point, he croaks an infamously terrible line — “What do you think of this boner I’ve got?” — before removing a bedsheet to reveal the bulge is actually a weapon. Perhaps I’m giving the script too much credit, but I think “boner” was meant to be a slurred “bow and arrow” to make an odd double entendre instead of a singularly bizarre non sequitur.

Breaking Bad's Giancarlo Esposito plays New Rome mayor and Cesar’s antagonist Cicero, who could be described as “a Giancarlo Esposito type.” Laurence Fishburne plays Cesar’s chauffeur but also a historian who narrates the film in voiceover and sometimes while onscreen. Dustin Hoffman appears as a guy in a toga who looks like he wants to hide behind the scenery when he isn’t smirking and wisecracking. Shia LeBeouf is Clodio, Crassus’ nephew, an especially debauched and depraved character, as evidenced by his makeup, high heels and incestuous lust.

Jason Schwartzman (who's Coppola's nephew) regresses from his wonderful debut as the ambitious dreamer Max Fischer in Rushmore to just some relative Coppola put in a movie, here playing a henchman with shifting or unclear loyalties.
Also in the movie: a nuclear Russian satellite floating over the planet like a gun over a mantel, Cesar repeating Hamlet’s entire “To be or not to be” monologue for no apparent reason other than to show off, a recitation of three different Marcus Aurelius quotes at a point in the movie when you’ll be involuntarily twirling your fingers in the “wrap it up” gesture, the death of Cesar’s wife (whose demise was pinned on the widower despite the apparent lack of a corpse), justly protesting citizens whipped into a fascist riot, treacherous yet dull machinations over control of a crooked bank, the auctioning off of the virginity of a teen ukulele-strumming pop star, a sex-video blackmail or revenge scheme that falls apart in about 90 seconds, the runway debut of an invisibility-cloak dress designed by Cesar that seems to exist for no other reason than to provide a whoppingly obvious visual metaphor or punch line, and sincere advocacy for walkable cities, environmentalism, libraries and public education.

If this all sounds like way, way, way too many themes and plot elements to cram into a movie, it is. At times the cheap-looking visual effects, some of which wouldn’t pass muster on a straight-to-streaming Marvel afterthought, are distracting at best. The plot is an absurd, incomprehensible mess.

It’s unfortunate Coppola worked on this thing for so long and somehow managed to produce a movie that looks like it was thrown together on the fly. With more time, perhaps he’d have whittled it down into a single masterpiece or expanded it into two or three great films to stand alongside the first two Godfather movies and Apocalypse Now. If only he could just shout, “Time, stop!” with the same authority he could allegedly tell a young actress to sit on his lap and call him uncle.

Despite its many problems, though, Megalopolis is a lot of fun to watch, at least for the first hour and a half or so. I saw it Wednesday night, the last chance to catch it in IMAX, but I think it would look better on a standard movie screen. Maybe the backdrops and CGI wouldn’t look quite as fake. Then again, maybe they’re supposed to look artificial, a “fuck you, too” to the visual effects team that quit halfway through production.

If this strange likely finale to Coppola’s career still sounds interesting despite all the negative reviews and troubling news about it, you probably would enjoy the experience — you might as well catch it in theaters before its time runs out once and for all.