Title – Megalopolis (2024) 

Director – Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) 

Cast – Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight 

Plot – Anyone’s guess! Taking place in the futuristic city of New Rome where the magical power harbouring Cesar Catilina (Driver) dreams of a new way of living as he comes to loggerheads with the cities under fire Mayor Cicero (Esposito), look out for Hamilton Crassus III (Voight) under blanket surprise!  

“Revenge is best in a dress!”

Review by Eddie on 29/11/2024

I’m not ashamed to admit it.

I have absolutely no clue what Megalopolis is about or what on earth many things I witnessed in Francis Ford Coppola’s mostly self-funded epic mean. 

A true cinematic oddity of insanely large proportions, Coppola’s Mega-flopolis is going to go down as one of the great follies of cinema history, with his passion project being unearthed after close to 40 years of gestation to scathing reviews and a lack of any audience interest, creating an experience that can admired from a point of view of being strikingly original and committed to its cause but also ridiculed for a huge collection of flaws that make this close to two and a half hour oddity equivalent in many ways to a big budgeted The Room. 

Recruiting a star-studded cast that is yet again lead by a misfiring Adam Driver who is in dire need of a new agent or a rebalancing of his once spectacularly consistent career, Megalopolis has all the ingredients of something that is at the very least competent, cohesive and colourfully imaginative yet while there’s no one that could question Coppola’s quest to do something he has never done and arguably no one else has ever done, it doesn’t give his bizarre attempt at grandiose sci-fi fable storytelling being as amateurish and incoherent as it often comes across as.   

While sitting and watching the film you’d be hard pressed to come too terms with the fact you’re witnessing a feature film from the man that gave us the first two instalments of The Godfather trilogy, The Conversation or even the similarly high-reaching Apocalypse Now, and while the years have not been kind to Coppola who has failed to reach any significantly notable milestones in the modern era, that Megalopolis feels like such a bad joke that goes on and on makes you question deeply what has happened to a creative genius who once changed the face of Hollywood filmmaking. 

A meme-making machine in waiting, there’s more than a handful of lines of dialogue, cringe-worthy scenes and haphazardly put together ideas in Megalopolis that are going to ensure this disastrously performing blockbuster lives long in the cult cannon with the added bonus of getting to witness the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight (prepare yourself, honestly), an utterly off the loose Shia LaBeouf and Aubrey Plaza embarrass themselves, even if intentionally, a bizarrely appealing proposition as you try and stay invested in a narrative that pays no heed to making much sense in the typical sense of the word. 

Against all the odds, around all this failure to launch, second-hand embarrassment and confusion there is still something in Megalopolis that showcases something that just might have been. 

There’s no question that the odds were always stacked against Coppola’s singular vision and there’s little point in trying to argue for Megalopolis existing in its final form but there’s a spark within this tale whether its in brief moments of stunning visuals, miniscule moments of ponderings of humanity that strike a chord or Driver telling someone to “get back to the clubbbbb”, there is something here amongst the ruins, a piece of something special that Coppola clearly envisioned but wasn’t able to deliver in one of the most intriguing messes of modern movie history. 

Final Say – 

At all times confusing, oftentimes downright atrocious and in parts brilliantly bonkers in its originality, no one can accuse Megalopolis of resting on its laurels but the many swings Francis Ford Coppola takes in his supposed “magnum opus” don’t add up to a satisfactory whole. A sad result for a concept that has long been a passion project for an industry icon. 

2 bow-ner and arrows out of 5