Review: Megalopolis (2024)

When George Lucas sold his empire to Disney in 2012, the press asked him what retirement would look like for him. The filmmaker and visionary said he was going to make personal, experimental films that nobody would see. Over a decade later, whether Mr. Lucas has made any of those movies or not remains a mystery. 

But Francis Ford Coppola has, and it's called Megalopolis. 

Both Coppola and Lucas were once faces of Young Hollywood, a group of upstart filmmakers in the 1960s who were steeped in classic studio pictures of the 1930s-1950s, but who also identified with the rebellious creators of the revolutionary French and Italian art scene, adopting the more experimental, gritty, and verite style of filmmaking that would go on to embody the American New Wave. For the last 25 years, Coppola has been so far under the radar that he's barely been on it at all. But with Megalopolis, his first feature film in many years--and very likely the last one he'll ever make--the filmmaker has cashed in all of his chips to craft a film that feels as if it's the culmination of his entire career. 

To be clear, Megalopolis is intensely uncommercial. It's opaque and impenetrable, yet also exceedingly earnest and occasionally even child-like. It's confounding, stupefying, and at times cringe-inducing in its sincerity. It's filled with expressionism, surrealism, characters that speak in extended Shakespearean soliloquies, who pontificate in Latin, and who sometimes deliver lines with a stiff amateurishness that is likely deliberately satirical. I'm not sure I like Megalopolis, but I respect it. 

We're told right from the title screen that this is a fable, so those expecting a straight-forward narrative are going to be infuriated. This is a tale of the 21st century in which the greedy elite hold the entire world in a stranglehold. The fall of Rome is being repeated in modern times as the quest for power, domination, and the accumulation of wealth and influence has crushed society to the point that it can no longer function. The metaphor between the latter days of Rome and our current quandary is not hidden; it's not subliminal. it's not subtext, it's just text. 

Enter Cesar (Adam Driver), a visionary who has the ability to literally stop time (because: fable). He's tortured, but he dreams of building a Megalopolis, a city/community that is not unlike Walt Disney's original vision for EPCOT (an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) in which everyone has what they need, they take care of each other unselfishly, and humanity thrives. Transportation issues and squalid living conditions will be a thing of the past and the future is going to be like that Coca-Cola commercial where everyone joins hands and sings. 

At least, that's part of it. Much of the movie is told through psychedelic, surreal techniques that are open to interpretation. Coppola throws every style you can think of at this film: split screen, animation, montage, and vignettes in silhouette, to name a few. Scenes drift into each other like a dream. Some shots hold for minutes at a time without cutting--a hat tip to New Hollywood brother Brian De Palma? In other scenes, the camera tilts in Dutch angles, left, then right, then left, as if we're on a ship at sea. This is a 120 million dollar art film, financed independently, produced through American Zoetrope without corporate control or interference. It's Coppola Unchained, The Full Francis, the culmination of a 60 years of storytelling encompassing everything from French New Wave to Salvador Dali. It's the way-off Broadway play that the eccentric genius playwright has mounted with a surprising cast and unconventional sets. Instead of black box theater, we have CGI that often shows the limited budget Coppola was working with, leaving us to wonder what could have been if he'd had the kind of money Scorsese (yet another New Hollywood compatriot) got for Killers of the Flower Moon or The Irishman. 

Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), a futuristic neo-noir set on a far away planet (really mid-sixties Paris), feels like a major influence on Megalopolis. In Godard's film, computers and technology have taken over the lives of the populace to the point that all human emotion has been destroyed. Logic rules, all in service of a better tomorrow, but it's only by destroying the institutions that enchain us that we're able to reach the next plateau of existence. Megalopolis seems to have similar things on its mind, but instead of computers, it points the finger at the media, at banks, corporations, and the political quest for power. If it sounds like a leftist dream, Jon Voight, arguably one of the most vocal supporters of the modern right, is here to tell us "not so fast." 

Just as there will be those unable to dig beyond the text of America as modern Rome, there will also be those unable to see beyond two-party politics. But Megalopolis is thinking in larger terms than Democrat and Republican, acknowledging that both parties are merely highways that lead to the same destination. The real problem, according to the movie, is bigger than politics; it's our innate greed, hatred, and selfishness that threatens to consume us, as it consumed the Roman Empire 1500 years ago, resulting in the collapse of the greatest society. All of this is in the film, but there's so much more. So many visual metaphors, so many acid-fueled daydreams, hypnotic diversions that lead to things that don't yet make sense to me. I don't understand it all. Maybe I never will.

Most people will hate this movie, if they even make it to the end. Coppola doesn't care. He's painted his final masterwork on his own canvas, and he's controlled every brush stroke, chosen every color. Nothing in this movie is an accident, nothing is a coincidence. Everything is deliberate. Coppola, 85 years old at the time of this writing, is nearing the end and thinking about this life and what lies beyond it. He's thinking about what will be left for his grandchildren. The man who tackled the struggle of burgeoning adulthood in You're A Big Boy Now (1966) and stared directly into the hearts of darkness with Apocalypse Now (1979) is still telling stories about our struggle with human nature. Megalopolis doesn't look like anything else in the director's filmography, but when you look at the themes (if you can decipher them), it's the same existentialism that he's been contemplating for his entire career. 

If this is indeed Coppola's final film, he's given us something that we'll be unpacking long after he's gone. There are layers here--some easily peeled back, others buried so deeply that they may only mean something to him. At the end of the day, film is an art form that requires no justification, no explanation, no happy endings, no neat and tidy bow. For a director who once helped create an iconoclastic style that angered and outraged the establishment, it's more than fitting that he's done it once again.  In one of the most commercialized eras of cinema in the history of the medium, Coppola has delivered something that is so out of place, so challenging, so unwelcome, that it may very well become infamous before it becomes beloved. I suspect Coppola might be ahead of us all, waiting for us to catch up.