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Keep reading for alternate takes from Giles Edwards and El Rob Hubbard

DIRECTED BY: Francis Ford Coppola

FEATURING: Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Lawrence Fishburne

PLOT: In mythical New Rome, inventor Caesar Catalina can stop time and has invented some kind of miracle substance called “Megalon,” but demagogues and rivals scheme to ruin him.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Megalopolis is a movie conjured by an 85-year old film genius that feels like it could have been made by a fresh film school graduate, if someone had given the kid $120 million dollars and tasked him with making an Important Statement. And I mean this all as a compliment: Coppola here is as brash, fearless, ambitious, and pot-dazzled as a twenty-four-year old tyro with stars in his eyes. Acting your age is for politicians, not filmmakers. The resulting movie is a bizarre mashup of Titus (1999), Southland Tales (2006), and Metropolis (1927), and if the entire city of New Rome constantly glows with a golden hue, it’s because the movie’s bananas.

GREGORY J. SMALLEY COMMENTS: Francis Ford Coppola conceived of the idea for Megalopolis as early as 1977, so you would think he would have had some of it plotted out already when it came time to sell his winery and finance the film in 2019. But, by all appearances, he decided to throw away whatever notes he had made in the previous decades and just wing it. The movie is plotted like a Shakespearean epic—when it’s plotted at all. The basic idea is that America today is a lot like Rome as it neared the end of the Republic and slid into the grandest despotism the world had ever seen. The solution, in Coppola’s view? We need more dialogue, because, as Caesar says, ” when we ask these questions, when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.” Also, it might help to have the unexplained ability to stop time, and to develop some new material called Megalon, which can do everything from design evening gowns for virginal pop stars to form the basic building blocks of the conveyor belts in an inner city Garden of Eden. Sounds like a job for Elon Musk—no, wait, we were shooting for a utopia.

Cesar Catilina (Driver) is some kind of hard-drinking Nobel Prize winner/architect who sleeps with socialites and reporters. Franklyn Cicero (Esposito) is the no-nonsense mayor who hates Cesar because he’s not pragmatic enough; his bright daughter Julia (Emmanuel) wants to sleep with Cesar (and support his utopian dreams). Cesar’s uncle, Crassus (Voight), is the richest man in New Rome, with all the altruistic humility that position implies. He marries entertainment reporter Wow Platinum (Plaza), who has also been sleeping with Cesar. Crassus’ son, the brilliantly named Clodio (LaBoeuf), is an aspiring demagogue who wants to replace Cicero. Half the cast overact, half play it straight, and almost everyone has some secret scheme against almost everyone else (although not all of them get resolved).

But the plot, or the big ideas, or even the chance to see famous actors in bad haircuts and togas isn’t the main reason Megalopolis succeeds as a weird, and a worthy, movie. Rather, the joy here is in seeing Coppola play with cinema as his own personal toy. Parties where Roman orgies meet Studio 54 depravity, Cesar launching into “Hamlet” soliloquies for no good reason, expressionistic shadows of wolves cast on tenements and iron statues that bend to weep, flowers that fly out of bouquets, reenactments of Ben Hur in Madison Square Garden, a dream about a cloud that grabs the moon, an Elvis impersonator singing “God Bless America” in front of a flag and a pink flamingo, and a bedridden Jon Voight admiring his boner. Stuff like this happens literally every couple of minutes throughout Megalopolis‘ 2+ hour runtime. Stuff that makes the 24-hour news cycle as filtered through “X” seem, you know, reassuringly normal. It may be completely wacko, entirely unhinged, mostly incoherent, and utterly unbelievable, but Megalopolis somehow captures our sick zeitgeist, the sense that our own republic is slowly circling the toilet bowl of history while we binge on lattes and Marvel original series. Insane times require insane films. The Roman Republic lasted 500 years. Coppola hopes we can beat that record, but I’m guessing that, if you put a gun to his head, he’d say we’re not going to make it.

GILES EDWARDS COMMENTS: The pragmatic Cicero administrates New Rome, the visionary architect Catalina designs its future, and Clodio wishes to rule over the crumbling city’s ashes. Give an auteur enough money and he’s bound to make something staggering—one way, or another. Coppola’s (possible) swan-song is quite “another”, and a perfect example of Sci-Fi-Roman Shakespearean Epic à la 1950s Hollywood.

Around ninety minutes into Megalopolis, I was wishing it was almost over. I had been impressed by the fascinating sets and costuming; I had been won over by the grandiosity of the stylized performances; and I remained on tenterhooks as to how this curiosity would ultimately resolve. But I wanted the film to wrap up because I was nearly overwhelmed with a yearning to talk about it with anyone willing to listen. I wanted to ask what others thought about the ideas, the characters, and specific scenes. And to its critics, most of all, I wanted to ask, What is it you wanted this movie to be?

The story is grand, and requires the oratorial gravity of Lawrence Fishburne in his prime: he is Megalopolis‘ narrator—and also the hero’s chauffeur. New Rome is tottering on the brink of collapse, nearing its end as the excesses of the city’s elite have piled so high and horrible. Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) has a utopian vision, one to be constructed by his mysterious new bio-organic building material, and with the assent and inclusion of all the citizens. Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) clings to the old ways in his attempt to keep the city’s edifice in place despite the forces tearing it apart. Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, sheds her skin as a parasitic socialite to better understand, and inspire, Cesar. And Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) is a former news reporter—now conspirator married to New Rome’s richest man—who dupes an idiot scion into grabbing what grandeur might be salvaged when the walls come tumbling down.

This array of grand characters maneuver through their various grand machinations on a city-sized set: New York as reflected in a golden mirror. Coppola allows his players license to act as largely as their characters demand, and there is a capital-“I” importance to much on screen. (While this tone is often punctured by wry observations from the characters, it is smashed during Adam Driver’s interlude of drug-soaked, dreamscape philosophizing during the virginity auction at the coliseum.) Every frame is a beauty, further bolstering the hulk, and the costumes shamelessly drip the opulence required of a modern-day gilded empire. And beyond the science-fiction tinged wonderment of Cesar’s visions, there is a core conceit: this drily-sardonic and tragedy-driven genius has it in his power to stop time.

As much as Coppola’s grand exhibition is about the dangers of greed, or the importance of conversation on a societal level, or is merely an allegorical dissection of contemporary politics, it is mostly about time. What we do with it? What may be done with it? And how might we be remembered as individuals? As families? As a species? These are important questions to ask. With Megalopolis, at least, Francis Ford Coppola ensures he’ll be remembered as a mystic who asked the right questions—and did so with unashamed bravura and masterly storytelling.

EL ROB HUBBARD COMMENTS: (This article originally appeared in a slightly different form on (mim-uh-zine & other loss leaders and refers to the “Ultimate IMAX Experience” of the film).

Megalopolis is a lot of things. It’s a sprawling epic tale (subtitled “A Fable”), audacious, and very messy. Mainly, it’s Francis Ford Coppola taking a big swing—again—and not giving a fuck at 85. Some of it may seem familiar. Some of it will have people on their feet applauding the testicular fortitude on display. And some of it will have people walking out wondering if dementia has finally caught up with them.

“It is what it is—deal with it, motherfuckers!” is Coppola’s response to his critics. And judging from recent recuts of earlier work to present them in definitive versions, Coppola has wisely decided to cement his legacy as a cinema artist before leaving the stage.

The best way to describe the film is as a huge mashup of elements. Plotwise, Coppola uses a historical incident from Ancient Rome, the Catalline Conspiracy, as the framework for the allegorical aspects of the story (and yes, being a typical American, I had to look it up). The tone, look and feel is raided from the past 100 years or more of American culture. One of the big touchstones is the 1936 film Things to Come, and there are a myriad of other references, allusions and homages. Along with Things to Come, it could also be called “Francis Ford Coppola’s Tommorowland“—not such a reach, since Brad Bird gets a mention in the “Special Thanks” credits.

Coppola was a guest programmer on Turner Classic Films the night before the IMAX screening, stumping for Megalopolis, and the two films he chose were screwball comedies, Libeled Lady (1936) and The Awful Truth (1937). As it turns out, those choices did have some bearing on Megalopolis, which borrows aspects of 30s-40s screwball comedies, but it doesn’t do full-on pastiche—it doesn’t reach that velocity. That doesn’t seem to be Coppola’s intent, although in the first third, it seemed like we were getting “Francis Ford Coppola’s The Hudsucker Proxy.”

Other references: The Fountainhead/Atlas Shrugged (without the neurotic over-the-top sexual tension); there’s a bit of Ayn Rand in the mix, since it’s about utopias, but not so much as to poison the entire enterprise. 1940sThrillers such as Nightmare Alley; some direct references to Night of the Hunter. The Roman epics of the 1950s, of course (the great score has some homage to Miklos Rozsa and Dimitri Tiomkin—and there’s even a chariot race!) Silent films (which become more apparent in the last third of the film when the referencing moves into the background and the film becomes its own thing). I’ll even go out on a limb and say there’s even a little bit of Batman (Tim Burton‘s Keaton era) in there.

That also goes for the actors: high praise for everyone involved, from Coppola veterans Giancarlo Esposito, Lawrence Fishbourne, Jason Schwartzman (who I mistook for Stanley Tucci at first, before doing the math) to Coppola newbies Adam Driver (whose character could be seen as a benign version of the creative genius he portrayed in Annettte), Aubrey Plaza (her Wow Platinum has a touch of Ida Lupino/Audrey Totter), Shia LeBoeuf, Jon Voight (playing a slightly more benign Trump). Grace VanderWaal makes an impression as a Taylor Swiftish type character. Nathalie Emmanuel isn’t bad, but at times appears to be slightly overwhelmed. And Dustin Hoffman‘s character is in and out quickly before he makes any impression (which may be due to post-production concerns, possibly).

I deliberately haven’t gotten into the plot of the film, because it doesn’t ultimately matter. If you come into Megalopolis expecting a three-act story structure that hits all the beats you read about in articles and books about screenwriting, you’re not going to be happy from the start. As stated before, “A Fable” is part of Megalopolis‘ title, reinforced by the first scene of the film (which was also the teaser trailer) of Adam Driver’s Caesar preparing to step off a building. If you don’t accept that scene at the start, nothing afterwards is gonna make you like it any better.

Another snide title we could apply would be “Francis Ford Coppola’s Southland Tales,” which is not that far off the mark. I did a re-watch of Southland the screening to get into a proper frame of mind, and it turned out to be a good choice. Southland Tales is an overstuffed commentary of America in the early 00’s, coming out of the ’90s, with the Book of Revelation taking place in Los Angeles. What was considered at the time to be ridiculous, absurd satire has turned out to be more coherent than our current nightmarish reality.

Megalopolis is an overstuffed commentary by a veteran American filmmaker, using NYC as an alternate version of Rome and an ancient historical incident as a center for a sprawling spewing visual essay around the statement, “We Need To Talk About The Future.” It’s the work of a director not at all concerned with weekend box-office success. Like Southland Tales, it’s designed to be watched repeatedly so you can find things you missed the last time you saw it. It’s designed to have a life well beyond the typical 1 to 2 week window of a theatrical release (for films that get theatrical releases at all).

It’s an Event Experience. If you were lucky enough to attend an “Ultimate IMAX Experience,” with its William Castle-esque interactive scene (which is something Coppola apparently wanted to do for sometime; Twixt had an interactive element for a screening or two, but it ultimately didn’t work out). It’s unwieldy; some of it is clunky and eye-rolling; but that is balanced out by great performances, visual artistry and callbacks to previous work. It’s the sum of a career that spans some 60 years. Good or bad, it’s memorable.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There is nothing in Megalopolis that feels like something out of a ‘normal’ movie. It has its own logic and cadence and vernacular…  The occasional dissolves that made the fever dreams of Apocalypse Now and Bram Stoker’s Dracula so gorgeously disorienting here take over entire sequences. In those pictures, these were stylistic flourishes. Here, it’s all flourish, all the time… Megalopolis might be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy every single batshit second of it.”–Bilge Ebiri, Vulture (Cannes screening)

Where to watch Megalopolis