Megalopolis review: a bizarre, overstuffed nightmare

Megalopolis is Francis Ford Coppola’s most ambitious passion project: a fable of epic proportions about a genius architect, Cesar Catalina, clashing with the corrupt Mayor Franklyn Cicero of New Rome – all set in a surreal version of modern America.

Well, at least that’s the official explanation. To me, Megalopolis is the most confusing experience I’ve ever had in the cinema. And I mean that in both a complimentary and derogatory sense.

Everything you’ve heard about this film is true: Adam Driver recites an entire soliloquy from Hamlet. Aubrey Plaza plays a character called ‘Wow Platinum’. And midway through the movie, the auditorium lights come up and an audience member is invited up to ‘speak’ to the screen, to which Cesar Catalina will respond. A whole lot of ‘concept’ is thrown at the proverbial wall, and barely any of it sticks – but there’s something so entertaining about watching ‘idea detritus’ slide off in such spectacular fashion.

It’s messy. It’s masturbatory. It’s Megalopolis.

Megalon, megalon, megalon

We enter New Rome: a vision of America’s distant future, which is somehow just like 1980s New York, except with modern technology and toga cosplay. Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito, once again playing a steely-eyed villain) is clutching onto the old ways of city governance – while also being embedded in several dodgy deals – and Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) is fighting him to build his dream city, Megalopolis. Some years ago, Cesar discovered a miracle ore named Megalon (yup) and won a Nobel Prize for it. Now he wants to use it to build a utopia that looks rather identical to an AI rendition of utopia: conveyer-belt walkways that go nowhere, buildings connected to air, bountiful gardens with plants of all seasons and continents growing together. Okay, let’s see how you go with that!

The script is either purposefully campy or woefully janky, sitting dialectically between William Shatner’s Captain Kirk and 1989’s Batman. Characters often speak in what we’re meant to think is Roman-esque, but is just dialogue from old sword-and-sandal movies. ‘Is this society where we’re living the only one that’s available to us?’ Cesar frames the obvious in a way that’s meant to be profound. And then we have such lines as ‘What do you think about my boner?’, which at least has the potential for a more interesting answer.

On that note, there are moments of Megalopolis that are screamingly funny – intentional or not – and watching them with an enthusiastic audience is a blast. At one point, Adam Driver points a finger at Nathalie Emmanuel and tells her to ‘go back to the club’ (pronounced here like ‘klerb’), and he does a little disco move with a sarcastic eyebrow raise. Funny as hell.

The circus/coliseum scene that follows is full of ridiculous moments like that, where a coked out Cesar bumbles through the back rooms while the virginal pop star Vesta (an obvious strike at Taylor Swift) debuts her next single, wrestlers fight each other, and acrobats bounce around in lycra. The whole thing is comprised of a series of CG sequences that look like they came straight out of The People’s Joker … which happens to be another self-funded passion project and thinly-veiled allegory for a director’s hopes and dreams … that is infinitely better than this shite.

ScreenHub: The People’s Joker: the wildest superhero movie you probably won’t watch

The times are new, Roman

Then there are the women, completing a full Bingo of New Hollywood stereotypes: we’ve got ‘loyal wife’; ‘dead wife’; ‘slutty mistress’; and ‘virgin who’s secretly a whore’. Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel, wandering aimlessly between set pieces) bemoans living in her father’s shadow, all while incessantly calling him ‘daddy’ and not really serving any other purpose but to propel Cesar’s story – which itself is very thin to begin with.

Aubrey Plaza seems to be having the time of her life, delivering terrible lines with electric self-awareness and chewing abysmal scenery like there’s no tomorrow. She’s either the only actor here to really understand what kind of film she’s making, or she’s in a different film entirely, probably Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. In fact, if you’re curious about the misguided ambition of Megalopolis but find that you’re more interested in dance than you are in architecture, just go and watch Showgirls.

One of the things that makes this film interesting is the meta-story of Megalopolis (the Meta-lopolis, if you will. And it’s okay if you won’t). Francis Ford Coppola, being unable to find studio funding for the film, self-financed it by selling his entire winery. He’d been working on the script for literal decades, putting it back in the drawer until the time was ‘right’. To state the obvious, it could have sat there forever, and maybe it should have. And really, the journey to getting it finally made is one of the only drawcards it has going for it – otherwise, how the hell do you market a film like this?

Veni Vidi Vici

I’m still not sure that what I saw was an actual film, or an expensive and overly-long proof of concept for a film. It’s a story about a misunderstood genius, that much I can glean, but Coppola seems less aligned with the idealistic Cesar and more in tune with the stubbornly old-school Mayor Cicero – whose real name is Francis, by the way. Is this his way of telling us he’s not fit to make art for this world anymore?

Had this film been the work of a first-time director, stretching a small indie budget to make their grand vision come to life, we could at least say Megalopolis had real gumption. Instead, I’m left with the feeling that what I just saw was a sprawling, perverse diary entry from a sad, horny senior citizen who’s perhaps had a few too many wines.

I was never bored.