Megalopolis

On The Fritz

Megalopolis
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
USA 2024
American Zoetrope
UK cinema release print

“Head and hands need a mediator.
The mediator between head and hands must be the heart.”
Metropolis, 1927

So the day before I saw Megalopolis, I watched a review by one of my favourite movie critics. 

Now, I find Francis Ford Coppola a bit hit and miss but he’s always very interesting and, one of the reasons I wanted to see this one was because he’d been trying to get this film made since he was talking about it on the set of Apocalypse Now in the 1970s. After many cast changes and false starts he finally raised the $120 million dollar budget out of his own pocket (to ensure the lack of studio interference), selling one of his own vineyards in the process. However, when I watched this one review of the film by the critic I have a lot of time for, it was a ten minute rant about how it’s possibly the worst movie he’s ever seen (someone’s clearly not seen Harlem Nights then!), for various reasons. So I kinda regretted that I'd bought the ticket to see it at Leicester Square but, I was in London to attend a book signing anyway and so I went through with it and, you know what... it wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

The film is a fable set in the late 21st Century where Adam Driver’s character Cesar Catilina, who has the power to freeze time whenever he wants, is one of the chief architects and power players in the royalty that is New Rome, taken over from New York (so SPQR USA, I guess). He’s also invented a new and magical building material called Megalon (not the same Megalon who is an enemy of Godzilla in a 1973 movie, reviewed here). And the whole film is a power struggle between the various members of the extended family who play Gods to this new Roman Empire... there’s Nathalie Emmanuel as latest love interest to Cesar, Julia Cicero. And there’s Giancarlo Esposito (Mayor Cicero), Shia LaBeouf (troublemaker Clodio Pulcher), Aubrey Plaza (as ambitious, backstabbing TV presenter Wow Platinum), Jon Voight (Hamilton Crassus III), Laurence Fishburne (as Cesar’s driver and wing man Fundi Romaine) and even Dustin Hoffman as a behind-the-scenes fix it man.

And I think the reason the film has been said to have no story is probably due to the fact that it’s such a fairly simple story that everyone is expecting more from it, perhaps. But there is one. And it’s been called unwatchable by many, it would seem... but no it isn’t. Unlike the reviewer I saw, I didn’t find it incredibly dull and it didn’t really feel longer than its two hours and eighteen minutes (although, it kinda felt like there may have been some cuts which could have expended certain scenes, like the final fate of Clodio).

And, yes, pretty much all the actors are giving absolutely scenery chewing, over the top performances which some may later come to regret and which seem stagey and contrived but... I’ve been thinking about this... I suspect a lot of this may have been exactly what Coppola was going for here.

To explain, the one review I saw didn’t mention a very specific film which, it turns out, lots of other people have mentioned in connection to this film... I just didn’t know about it. So I was about two thirds of the way through Megalopolis before I realised that this is a film very much informed by the 1927 Fritz Lang silent movie, Metropolis (reviewed here). And I wish I’d figured that out sooner because, yes, the dialogue is extremely bad and so much nonsense in this film, for the most part but, if you scratch that off the surface and look at it as a silent movie, treating the dialogue as unnecessary chatter, then you do have a film which starts to resemble those lofty heights that Lang committed to celluloid at the end of the silent era.

Yes, it’s a somewhat bloated corpse of a movie but, perhaps that’s how the younger generation may perceive Metropolis as being if they were presented with it as a brand new film nowadays. And, look, I’m not denying that there are a lot of problems and unfortunate artistic dead end choices in this movie but, I think it’s not something you should dismiss so lightly either... I think it’s definitely worth a look and my gut instinct is telling me that 30 to 50 years from now, if Coppola is still remembered, then this film may come under a certain re-appraisal and people might start taking it a little more seriously than, well, than it’s even possible to do right now.

Given that the film is quite all over the place tonally in some sequences, I have to also give a round of applause to composer Osvaldo Golijov, who manages to shift his musical palette through a number of different styles and really does help bring together the movie as a whole, I think.

One last thing about Megalopolis, before I move on and forget about this one for a while... the reviewer who I watched before I saw the film brought up the movie Caligula (reviewed by me here) and said that it’s a much more interesting way of doing things than what Coppola has done here. I don’t think Coppola was necessarily influenced by that film but, I think it was a good call to invoke it because there were many stretches of the movie, especially at the start, which do call to mind that particular film (actually, if Megalopolis had more female nudity, I would have thought a lot more of it, I suspect). 

It is then, as far as I'm concerned, a never dull but perhaps less substantial take on a kind of melding between the sensibilities of Metropolis and Caligula (another film people are citing in relation is The Fountainhead but, I’ve never seen it so can’t comment either way). And although it is not going to make many people who see it happy, I’m really glad I did take the opportunity to go to the screening and could certainly be tempted back to see it again in ten years or so. It’s not the aesthetic disaster that many reviews may lead you to believe but, similarly, I think this will fail abysmally at the box office and I kinda feel for Coppola (who recently lost his wife during post production). I hope this noble dinosaur of cinema can remain untouched by the possible public lambasting this film may well receive. An interesting failure then but, one which may well be considered a success by many in later years, I feel.