Megalopolis is Fucking Insane

"I hate it. It's awesome..."

It’s hard to know where to start writing about Megalopolis (or Megalopolis: A Fable), but I would be remiss if I did not say from the very beginning: it’s bad. Very bad. Remarkably bad. Astoundingly bad.

For what he has said will be his final film, Francis Ford Coppola has decided to deliver an epic of even epic-er proportions. A story he sees as so important, so prescient, and so vital that it may change the face of filmmaking — or, dare I say, the world — as we know it! A veritable gestamkunstwerk set in a fantastical world very much like our own. The stakes of this thing are set so very, very high, that seeing it fail to deliver wouldn’t necessarily be shocking, just disappointing. But in Megalopolis, Coppola has managed to take the act of failure from merely boring or tedious to positively spectacular.

I knew this going in. Critics have eviscerated this thing. Audiences who initially saw it at Cannes though it was a mess,Wendy Ide of the Guardian called it a work of “screaming emptiness,” and Drew Magary in SF Gate called it an “unwatchable piece of shit.” Gotta say, I have to disagree with Magary on this one. While Megalopolis the movie is undeniably bad, Megalopolis the spectacle is incredibly watchable and often hilarious. A bloated passion project by a once celebrated multi-millionaire director, it is truly a movie of our time: late-stage neoliberalism.

It is difficult to overstate how (almost) everything about Megalopolis is patently ridiculous. There is seemingly no end to the dumbfounding artistic decisions Coppola made directing this movie. Characters go from quoting the entirety of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” to simply “What the fuck is this?”. The CGI looks like a 2010s Fererro Rocher commercial. The futuristic city looks like “the world if…” meme. For Christ’s sake, Aubrey Plaza is Wow Platinum. Megalopolis is stupendously stupid, like an adaptation of The Fountainhead if it was directed by Tommy Wiseau.

Still, there’s something fascinating about how this movie exists as a product of our cultural zeitgeist. This is a very personal a film for Coppola, one that he’s been developing since 1982, selling off a considerable chunk of his winery in order to finance it. Knowing this creates an intimate viewing experience, like watching a dying artist implore the world to see his vision one last time that he might just be able to save it. Of course, this is no guarantee that his message will have any substance, on the contrary, Megalopolis presents its audience with a vision of the world that is entirely narcissistic, completely delusional, and deeply cynical.

Set in a retro-futurist New York called “New Rome” against the backdrop of a dying American empire, our story centres on Coppola’s own Howard Roark, Caesar Catalina. Played by Adam Driver, Caesar is a genius architect trying to build a utopian city (“Megalopolis”) inside of New Rome out of an indestructible material he’s invented called “megalon.” Standing in the way is Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Gincarlo Esposito), an unpopular, power-hungry politician who wants to build a casino in the same place. He sees megalon as a substance too risky to use, and Caesar’s utopian city will take too long to build. “People need help now!” he says, “Don’t let the now destroy the forever,” replies Caesar.

Over the course of the film we see Caesar fight for his utopia against his scheming cousin Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf); reject the wiles of his vampy ex-girlfriend Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza); and all fall deeply in love for Franklyn’s daughter Juliana (Natalie Emmanuel), who becomes his wife and muse. Oh, and he can also stop time for some reason like he’s Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell (I believe Coppola intended for this to be a metaphor for artistic vision, but it’s done so clumsily I’m not surprised most people don’t get it).

To build Megalopolis, Ceasar must face-off against Franklyn, arguing that he should support this project to build a better world because humanity is fundamentally good and empathic. Cicero disagrees, claiming that he’s trying to protect humanity from itself: “Utopias turn into dystopias,” he says. Clodio spends his time trying to tarnish Caesar’s name by turning to politics, but after Caesar’s Megalopolis is built, his supporters turn on him. Wow is a gold digger who tries to lure Caesar away from Juliana, but ends up getting shot in the chest by an arrow shot by Jon Voight, who plays the fabulously wealthy banker Hamilton Crassus III (it is hard not laugh watching this scene). After Caesar and Juliana marry (“But Daddy I love him!”), Franklyn and Caesar eventually make peace, with Franklyn finally deciding to cast aside all doubt and put his faith in Caesar’s futuristic city.

This is a movie with something to prove, and that is:
“Francis Ford Coppola is a really good director.”

Overall, there is a palpable feeling of resentment in Megalopolis. As a character (and an obvious stand in for Coppola himself), the struggle that Caesar faces in the movie is not so much to build Megalopolis, but to be recognized and celebrated for his genius. He’s a visionary, Nobel-Prize Winning inventor but despite it all he must still spend a great deal of time fighting off his critics and reassuring the public that his revolutionary new material megalon is in fact, perfectly safe. Throughout the film Coppola has Caesar undermined, misunderstood, and slandered (Clodio even makes a deep-fake video of him defiling New Rome’s own “Vestal Virgin”), yet still, Caesar continues on his journey to build Megalopolis for no reason save his faith in humanity. I imagine that Coppola also wants us to know that his drive for recognition doesn’t have anything to do with Caesar’s relationship with his mother (Talia Shire), who’s suffering from dementia and couldn’t care less about her Nobel-Prize-winning son. This sense of entitlement goes beyond the world of the film and into its marketing as well, with the second trailer featuring quotes from reviews disparaging Coppola’s most celebrated films (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Bram Stoker’s Dracula), as if they were trying to control the narrative about a movie they knew critics were going to hate. The fact that these quotes did not in fact come from these reviews feels remarkably fitting for a movie that is undeniably high on its own supply. It’s a movie with something to prove, and that is: “Francis Ford Coppola is a really good director.”

While I have already mentioned this, it bears repeating how it is impossible to miss how much this movie owes to Ayn Rand: its art-deco aesthetic, its philosophy, the kinky sex (Wow Platinum aggressively doms Clodio). In many ways it’s a testament to Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, what could better be described as “Great Man Theory”: the idea that history is primarily influenced by men (it’s always men) who possess a superior intellect, moral character, and vision for future than the majority. For these enlightened few, it is their responsibility to drag the rest of society kicking and screaming into a better world. Of course, since their radical ideas will upset the powers that be, changing the world to suit their vision will be no easy task, but time shows us that they are (almost) always proven right. If we are to learn anything from history, it is that when we come across these great men, we must build our society to support them — letting them be great — lest we hold society back. It’s an antiquated, sexist, and reactionary theory of history has been disproven time and time again, yet still persists because it tells a story that rationalizes our current structures of power and insulates them from criticism. A man with money and power must logically possess some great skill, talent or virtue by which he and he alone has been able to accumulate it, and therefore is solely responsible for himself and no one else. Their detractors are either cowards afraid of the future (this is Franklyn Cicero, who eventually gets with the program), or parasites who envy other’s greatness out of shame for their own flaws (this is LaBoeuf’s Clodio, who admits this Caesar). Despite trying to present Caesar as having an optimistic vision of humanity (he argues that the only reason we’ve survived as a species is our capacity for empathy), there are very few characters in the film outside of his direct supporters that you could describe as pleasant. Don’t even get me started on how this film depicts women (poorly).

Megalopolis is also a profoundly anti-democratic film. It spends most of its time with the elites of New Rome and — save for a few shots of them looking through chain-link fences — rarely shows us the people Caesar is supposedly building Megalopolis for. The citizens of New Rome are portrayed as a guileless, naive mob who are easily swayed by Clodio’s chants of “Power to the people!” Coppola’s use of a slogan once used by the Black Panthers to represent a Trumpian, right-wing populism suggests that he sees any form of populism or political action as suspect. He even has Clodio deliver his stump speech next to an actual stump in the shape of a swastika (I rolled my eyes at that one). Yes, people are ultimately good and empathic, but they’re also simple-minded and ignorant, making any kind of politics requiring “the will of the people” a dead-end.

Megalopolis closes on New Year’s eve with Caesar addressing the unwashed masses and calling for “a great debate” about the future (the one thing we’re not doing enough of, apparently). The final shot features a baby (Caesar and Juliana’s daughter, “Sunny Hope”), and a title card with a “pledge of allegiance to humanity.” The closing credit song features a chorus that repeats the line: “if you can’t change the world / change yourself.” It’s a saccharine and patronizing sentiment that seems to ignore how Caesar’s Megalopolis is not a democracy but a kind of techno feudalism that places himself at the top, the kind of world that Silicon Valley billionaires with dog-eared copies of Atlas Shrugged have been dreaming about. Like Caesar, Coppola claims he wants to bring about the best in humanity, but his interest in the other humans is remarkably shallow. Will the people of New Rome even want to live in a city that looks like a Mario Kart track inside a shampoo commercial? Who knows? Who cares?

In what feels like an effort to save the dying American empire, Coppola has inadvertently created what feels like its epitaph. What makes the spectacle of Megalopolis’ failure so interesting is that it feels like something we keep seeing over and over in our current cultural moment. Drew Magary is wrong to call Megalopolis a piece-of-shit film, because it’s not. It’s the Cybertruck. It’s Vultures I. It’s the Apple Vision Pro. It’s FTX. It’s the Metaverse. It’s NFTs. It’s the Great Man tripping on his own feet and falling flat on his face. If there’s a moral to the “fable” of Megalopolis, it’s that putting all our faith in Great Men will not give us a better world, but it will give us one we deserve: an over-built, self-serving disaster.