Megalopolis

I had the exciting opportunity to see Megalopolis with a packed theater audience, complete with a Q&A with Francis Ford Coppola live streamed straight from AMC Lincoln Square. I was excited, anxious, but most of all absolutely enamored with the prospect of seeing this film in the format it is designed: with a packed crowd to fully take in what I was sure to be a unique experience. Sadly, as the screen switched over to the pre-screening Q&A, we were met with technical difficulties: the connection cut out every 5-10 seconds! We were left only able to see maybe 5 minutes total of the 45-minute Q&A. Little did I know this was only a teaser of what his film would feel like; Megalopolis chugs along for 138 minutes and, like with the Q&A, I was left grasping at bits and pieces left and right to have a semblance of an idea of what was happening along the way.

This may seem like a platitude with how often it has been said, but if nothing else, you will walk out of this film feeling that it is ambitious. Ambition is absolutely seeping out of every crack and crevice of this film, to the point that it is almost all this film has going for it. The high production value coupled with the attempt at grand storytelling with metaphors of time, space, and legacy gives it this air of prestige and high potential. Though it never lives up to all this promise, the film should at least be applauded for trying.

Megalopolis shoves you into the deep end by beginning in the middle of a rapidly evolving story, and we are left playing a catch-up game to learn about these characters and their motivations. We meet the ambitious architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) who is in charge of the Design Committee to rebuild the city of New Rome. He also has the super ability to stop time with this super material called a Megalon that is able to manipulate space and time. With it, he is attempting to create a super-city that will last forever, a “Megalopolis”. Throughout the entirety of this film he gets pushback from the sitting mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) who is steadfastly committed to making small short-term improvements to the city. Between all of this, Cesar falls in love with Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who wants something more in her life and commits herself to helping Cesar fulfill his vision. Throughout this story, we meet other notable characters within this world like television presenter Wow Platinum (marvelously played by the great Aubrey Plaza), who is obsessed with Cesar and power and will stop at nothing to get both, and Clodio Pulcher (Shia Lebeouf), who is also in love with Julia and tries to jockey for power amongst the chaos of the city to take down Cesar.

Many ideas and theories in this film are brimming with potential: the idea of building this utopia, the tension between relationships between all these characters, and the constant mention of the importance of time and making something that will last. However, nothing here ends up fully realized or executed. Instead, it just feels like a salad of such copious amounts of ingredients that you can barely tell what it’s supposed to be anymore. The visuals are obnoxiously ugly with horrific color grading, the sound has some moments of greatness but aren’t prevalent enough to help the film in any way, and the score is just so nonexistent I forgot it was there completely at times. The script ends up trapping every character in this perpetual lucid dream of events and makes it tough for anybody to really put in any decent performances. There are endless monologue sequences from Cesar that are remarkably nonsensical that somehow use so many words that mean so little. There are constant time jumps after major events in the film, with massive plot developments happening off-screen. There are so many contrasting events going on within this film it almost warrants another hour, but with the way this script was constructed I’m not confident that it would have been for the best in the end.

Contributing to the glorious mess of Megalopolis is its scattered, disconnected ensemble. Every performance somehow feels so dissonant from one another that it is as if they are all acting in different films. For instance, though I understand that the cast is stuck in a tough position with one of the worst scripts I’ve ever seen, Adam Driver is just confoundingly lost in this role. He never seems fully into it and sounds as if he's going through the motions in many scenes here. He seems to give almost no emotion throughout the film, as if he’s reading the script straight off the page for the first time. Nathalie Emmanuel ultimately has no clue what's going on; sometimes she plays the role as if it's comedic and other times she plays it so straight that it’s infuriating to watch. Giancarlo Esposito is wallpaper in every scene he is in. He may be present often, but he never has a presence. Despite the many unfortunate performances in this film, two actors manage to shine: Aubrey Plaza and Shia LeBeouf. They are the only decent performances here as they seem fully committed to giving the film’s zaniness and hammy dialogue everything they could. Ultimately, my main takeaway from Megalopolis was that I wanted more of Aubrey Plaza. I would have loved to watch a movie solely about her character.

Trying to parse through this film to find meaning or explanations to the things that occur would take much more time than I'm willing to commit to this film. The best I can come up with is that Francis Ford Coppola really strived to create a legacy-defining film. The bones are there for a film about time, how little of it we have left there, and how we can desperately try to bend it by creating something that will last forever through conversation and debate. And to be fair, there is absolutely enough here to spark discussion for a long time. However, I’m not exactly sure that this was the discourse he was hoping for when he sold his wine business to finance this film. Truly, I wanted to love this film. I went in with a completely open mind, willing to give the movie the attention it needed to work. Alas, I left utterly disappointed because there are parts to this fundamentally broken machine that could have and should have worked. There are so many ideas that would have been beautiful to watch if they had been executed to their fullest potential. Instead, it feels like a puzzle of a masterpiece that was made with incorrect pieces forced together to create an incoherent, confused, and frankly terrible final product.

2/10