I’ve been writing movie reviews on this site (and before that, on Facebook) for fifteen years, and have seen countless other flicks in the meantime that never got a full writeup. It takes a lot for me to think that a movie really breaks new ground. All that to say: Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is something genuinely original.
To be clear, that’s not to say it’s great. It’s a sprawling, messy, unbelievably ambitious sci-fi political epic that defies comparison to basically anything else. (The best I can do is “The Fountainhead meets The Hunger Games.” But it’s absolutely, chaotically watchable, coupling modern special effects and old-school pacing with Coppola’s singular auteurish vision.
In the city of “New Rome” (New York, but with neo-Roman aesthetics woven in), impassioned young architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) struggles to realize his vision for a new kind of city. (Oh, also, he also seems to have the ability to magically stop time.) At the heart of his architectural vision is a mysterious new building substance known as the “megalon,” an invention of Catilina’s that may hold the key to saving the world.
Not everyone is on board. He’s opposed by Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito)—patron of keeping things the way they are—as well as revolutionary/reactionary Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), who’s inciting populist passions against Catilina’s project, and jilted ex-mistress Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza as a scenery-chewing femme fatale). But others—including the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel)—find Catilina brilliant.
Sure, there are lots of similarities here to The Fountainhead—Ayn Rand’s tale of bold architect Howard Roark fighting for his architectural aspirations against a horde of moochers, mediocrities, and bureaucrats. But that’s just the skeleton of the plot. Beyond that, it’s impossible to capture just how arrestingly strange the rest of Megalopolis is. Lots of characters speak in a weird, quasi-Shakespearean cant. There are moralistic title cards interspersed throughout the film, featuring fortune-cookie aphorisms about civilizational decline and the human spirit. There are rumbling Laurence Fishburne voiceovers. There are surrealist montages. Oh, and there’s also a chariot race at Madison Square Garden.
I have never seen anything else remotely like this. You probably haven’t either. So it’s not surprising that reactions to the film have been so polarized: it’s a bizarre movie filled to the brim with unexpected ideas and images, and a tone that swings wildly from drama to farce to epic, sometimes within the same scene.
Curiously enough, the film isn’t especially opaque. This isn’t an arthouse piece held together by thin wisps of plot—it’s quite straightforward, building toward a conclusion that’s narratively satisfying. Obviously, there’s a lot going on here thematically. But if I had to derive a single point from Megalopolis, it would be this: a healthy politics must not find itself caught only between the two poles of defense of a decaying status quo (Cicero) and insurgent, nihilistic revolt against it (Clodio). A healthy polity must also nurture, somewhere within its walls, the seed of a brighter and paradigm-transcending future. This, I think, is the real meaning of Catilina’s (unexplained) ability to “stop time”: it’s not so much a superpower as metaphor, an ability to “pause” the cacophonous flow of current events and ascertain the eternal principles beyond it. It is the ability, in short, to see what really matters. And that is what Catilina’s imagined Megalopolis truly stands for—the dream of an impossibly bright future.
This future, though, isn’t necessarily a liberal fantasia. One of the film’s most interesting, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hot takes is a subplot involving a high-profile Vestal Virgin (Grace VanderWaal), who’s depicted in Coppola’s New Rome as an acrobatic pop singer ingénue committed to a “purity pledge.” (Think Taylor Swift crossed with The Righteous Gemstones crossed with Cirque du Soleil. That really sums it up.) Midway through the film, the Vestal Virgin is caught up in a sex scandal (which also happens to involve AI-doctored deepfakes). Her exposure as a fraud, in turn, leads to a broad-based collapse of New Rome’s sexual ethics, triggering the civic unrest that leads into Megalopolis’s third act.
Megalopolis isn’t especially subtle about its social commentary, and I have to admit I wasn’t expecting to encounter the message that “public affirmation and maintenance of sexual boundaries is necessary for civilization.” But that’s what Coppola gives us: a curious affirmation of sexual conservatism in a story otherwise committed to pushing forward human progress.
That being said, I don’t want to give the impression that this is a film defined by its politics (as much as Coppola, in some ways, might want it to be). This is a passion project, and certainly not a film for everyone. It may not be a film for very many people at all (judging by its anemic box office returns so far). But it’s been a long time since anything quite this visionary, this impassioned, hit theater screens. And that’s worth celebrating.
Literary Analysis 