Francis Ford Coppola is responsible for some truly iconic movies, including The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. His newest creation, Megalopolis, could very well end up in that same conversation, at least in terms of scope, as the esteemed filmmaker has apparently been working on this passion project since the 1980s. That labor of love — and $120 million of Coppola’s own money — has finally been witnessed by an audience, as Megalopolis premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 16, and critics are sharing their views on the science fiction drama.
Megalopolis is set in New Rome (an alt-universe NYC) following a huge accident that destroyed the decaying metropolis. As an architect with the power to control time — Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina — aims to rebuild, he faces opposition from New Rome’s corrupt mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). The cast is brimming with stars like Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf and Jon Voight, so let’s see what critics think, starting with IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, who grades the movie a B+, writing:
As personal and egoless as you could ever hope to expect from an $120 million self-portrait that doubles as a fable about the fall of Ancient Rome, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is the story of an ingenious eccentric who dares to stake his fortune on a more optimistic vision for the future — not because he thinks he can single-handedly bring that vision to bear, but rather because history has taught him that questioning a civilization’s present condition is the only reliable hope for preventing its ruin. Needless to say, the movie isn’t arriving a minute too soon.
Damon Wise of Deadline says the movie bulldozes several filmmaking rules — including an audacious fourth-wall-breaking gimmick — but love it or hate it, this was the film the writer/director set out to make. Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis reinvents the possibilities of cinema, Wise writes, and it’s sure to inspire as many people as it will inevitably alienate. The critic continues:
True to the advance gossip, Megalopolis is something of a mess — unruly, exaggerated and drawn to pretension like a moth to a flame. It is also, however, a pretty stunning achievement, the work of a master artist who has taken to Imax like Caravaggio to canvas. It is a true modern masterwork of the kind that outrages with its sheer audacity. In the early 20th century, the French shook their umbrellas at this kind of thing, and it will not get a soft landing in 2024, since it commands you to bend to its vision.
Bilge Ebiri of Vulture says Megalopolis might be the craziest movie he’s ever seen, and he enjoyed “every single batshit second of it.” To illustrate the point, Ebiri writes:
There is nothing in Megalopolis that feels like something out of a ‘normal’ movie. It has its own logic and cadence and vernacular. The characters speak in archaic phrases and words, mixing shards of Shakespeare, Ovid, and at one point straight-up Latin. Some characters speak in rhyme, others just in high-minded prose that feels like maybe it should be in verse. At one point, Adam Driver does the entire ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy from Hamlet. Why? I’m not exactly sure. But it sure sounds good.
While some critics are embracing the absolute madness of this new world, others just can’t get behind the project. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, for instance, calls Francis Ford Coppola’s epic “megabloated and megaboring,” saying that despite its compelling question about the future of the U.S. empire, nothing can save the movie from bad acting and bad visual effects. Bradshaw gives the Megalopolis 2 out of 5 stars, saying:
For me this is a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film, full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanity’s future. It’s simultaneously hyperactive and lifeless, lumbered with some terrible acting and uninteresting, inexpensive-looking VFX work which achieves neither the texture of analogue reality nor a fully radical, digital reinvention of existence.
Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair calls the drama “the junkiest of junk drawer movies” and a “passion project gone horribly wrong.” Lawson says for all of its faults, its datedness is what really tanks the movie, with only a few glimpses of a computer, no cellphones and people getting their news from newspapers. As for the plot, the critic says:
If any of this sounds interesting, I assure you it is not. Coppola’s dull but voluble script says very little, or at least very little that can be cogently deciphered. The film plays as if the entire thing was rewritten after the actors had shot their parts and gone home. Nothing—no reaction shot, no transition between scenes—seems to sync, leaving the performances completely at sea. Driver, whose natural charisma complements Coppola’s faux-classical tone, manages some gravity here and there, but few others fare as well.
Megalopolis is a polarizing movie, to be sure, and with 26 critics weighing in on Rotten Tomatoes following its Cannes premiere, the film is rated 46%. It will be interesting to see how the conversation surrounding this project that was decades in the making continues to evolve as we wait for a release date. Keep an eye on the 2024 movie calendar for that and all of the other upcoming releases.