Once in a while a film is made which is so ambitious it becomes profound, a film that attempts to encapsulate the whole of human experience, a film that is richly complex, beautifully crafted, perfectly acted, which tells a story of humanity and frailty and greed and loss and love, which features a cinematic rendering of time that is moving in its totality, a film so lushly human it is unforgettable, and that film is Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. Other films are Cats. Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film, the long-gestating Megalopolis, is Cats.

 

To say Megalopolis is bad is to say that the Grand Canyon is small. Megalopolis is observably bad. It’s bad like being cornered at a party and talked at for three hours by a total boor, it’s bad like that one college class taught by a professor who clearly hates his students, it’s bad like being trapped in a car with a person who won’t stop farting. It’s boring, it’s contemptuous, somehow, it is suggestive of bad smells. It is so bad you will never forget it. It must be seen to be believed, but you will regret the seeing of it. A lot of people worked hard on this film, and I would like to interview every single one of them. I would then like to give them the phone number of a good therapist. 

In Megalopolis, Coppola encourages us to think about The Future and Open A Dialogue. He does this by rebranding New York City as New Rome, making a blatant comparison between America and the late-stage Roman empire, a comparison a million people have made before. If you are hoping for some elegance, some cinematic artistry, abandon all hope. Whatever Coppola had that allowed him to parallel the death of the American dream through the rise and fall of a mafia family is gone. Subtlety is a wish, narrative grace is dead and buried in the backyard. Insult to injury, he has not mastered modern technologies, and Megalopolis looks as chintzy as any half-assed superhero movie. 

 

Megalopolis encompasses so much, it’s hard to know where to start. Perhaps with the stupid little Caesar cut given to Adam Driver, because he’s literally playing a man named Cesar. Or how about the Roman-style circus held inside Madison Square Garden, because modern day Rome, get it? Or the sequence in which Adam Driver just recites Shakespeare, the scripting equivalent of enlarging your font and expanding the margins to meet a page minimum. Coppola doesn’t trust the audience to understand anything, everything is spelled out, everything is blatant, up to and including using footage from Ground Zero to represent the vulnerability of a failing state. It is in exactly as much bad taste as you’re thinking. 

 

The actors, though, know what film they’re in. Aubrey Plaza plays a financial news vixen named, improbably and comically, Wow Platinum. She’s like Jim Cramer crossed with a Fox News blonde, and she tackles the role with the enthusiasm of Janet Snakehole on a five-day bender. Jason Schwartzman has a small role and brings real “Hunger Games Capitol” energy to it. And I regret to inform you that Shia LaBeouf is great as the gender-bending dirtbag cousin of Cesar, who might be f-cking his sisters and is definitely trying to f-ck over Cesar. As for Driver, the way he delivers the line “Go back to the cluuuub” will live rent free in my head forever. I will never stop thinking about it. 

Giancarlo Esposito and Nathalie Emmanuel almost achieve a representation of humanity as the father-daughter pair of Mayor Cicero—Cesar’s political enemy—and Julia, a med school dropout whiling her nights way in the cluuuub, until she meets Cesar, who can control time (this serves no real purpose throughout the film). There are moments where you can see the shape of a decent film about family, loyalty, and progress in the scenes between Cicero and Julia, but Megalopolis is damn near three hours long and there isn’t enough of that duo to sustain it. The less said about Grace VanderWaal as a virginal teen popstar caught up in a sex scandal, the better, but now we know that Francis Ford Coppola knows who Britney Spears is.

 

There are many incredible sights in Megalopolis, such as great actors standing and staring into space in the background of shots, as if calculating how much they’re getting paid per second and wondering whether or not it’s worth it, or visual effects that look like Windows screen savers circa 2002. There is a new substance called Megalon—“James Cameron unobtanium” levels of bad—that Cesar shoves into his brain at one point, and nothing comes of it. There are so many things happening, none of them good, none of them amounting to anything. Coppola worked on this script for decades. Did he, though? I’m not convinced he worked on this script for five minutes. Half of it is quotes. 

But there is something captivating about such a complete failure of a film. It’s not about gawking at a train wreck, because a wreck is random and everything about Megalopolis is intentional. Coppola made decisions, a lot of baffling decisions, to complete this film, an object which defies cinema and comprehension. It is unwatchable, and yet it begs to be studied, to be picked apart until all its component units are inventoried, categorized, and locked away so that no one can ever do this to us, the movie-going public, ever again. It is a folly of a film, a singular vision so spectacularly miscalibrated it is impressive in its utter wrongness.

 

Only Francis Ford Coppola could make Megalopolis, with its aura of corruption and crime, and yet it has a strangely smooth finish, like a memory of hard times sepia-toned with nostalgia by someone who used to have little but has had so much for so long he’s forgotten what hardship really is. The wealthy citizens of New Rome are insulated from the rabble of the city, but so, too, is Coppola insulated from the rabble of the real world. Megalopolis is lecturing and tone deaf, as if we’re not already worried about inequity, inequality, climate disaster, and political inertia killing us all. Think about the future! his film screams at us every ten minutes. My guy, we already are. 

Megalopolis is exclusively in theaters from September 27, 2024.