Francis Ford Coppola, best known for producing the blockbuster film “The Godfather,” has gone off the rails in his latest movie “Megalopolis,” written and directed by the man himself. Two hours of torture, one incredibly disjointed plot… and Sept. 11?
New Rome is what it sounds like. Modeled after New York City, Coppola intertwines Gen Z culture with that of Ancient Rome. The characters compliment their togas with head wreaths and have names like Julia, Cesar and Clodio. One of the only things I genuinely liked about this movie is that the wardrobe department did a good job balancing Roman and modern fashion. All the looks are sleek and stylish.
“Megalopolis” opens with the protagonist, Cesar Catilina, demonstrating his superpower: the ability to stop time. Catilina is an architect who wants to transform New Rome into a city called… wait for it… Megalopolis. He’s one of those people who says a lot of nothing. His exaggeratedly posh tone comes off as condescending. It’s supposed to make him sound like more of a philosopher, but what Coppola doesn’t understand is that it’s not about the tone, although that is a major component in rhetorical persuasion, it’s about the content, and that falls flat.
Catilina’s stay-at-home girlfriend is a woman named Wow Platinum, which is very fitting because she is a gold digger conspiring to steal his fortune. All her lines are badly written and delivered.
Julia and Catilina attend a Roman-themed wedding reception where Catilina is bombarded by journalists who want more details about Megalopolis. Catilina goes backstage to use drugs. There’s this whole montage where he’s supposed to be using his magic powers and it’s all ethereal and everything, but because he was popping pills in the previous scene, it all comes off as a drug-induced hallucination. Which it probably is, despite what Coppola wants us to believe.
It turns out that Catilina has been demolishing neighborhoods to build Megalopolis, leading to widespread homelessness in the city. Clodio, who is now an anarchist revolutionaire, starts a campaign to dethrone Catilina before he can do too much damage. Then a meteor strikes and the entire city is destroyed anyway. Very anti-climatic.
After this happens, for some reason, real footage of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks play. I found that extremely disrespectful. Real scenes of carnage and terror in a set to terrible background music, and for what purpose?
At the conclusion, Catilina gives a nonsensical speech. What he’s saying has no substance as usual, but he uses a lot of fancy words and so he sways the crowd’s opinion in his favor. The end.
I wouldn’t recommend wasting your money and time watching this. The humor isn’t genuinely funny, it’s just supposed to be because it’s vulgar. The plot makes absolutely no sense. One minute we’re building Megalopolis and the next minute we’re manipulating time and space and the minute after that it’s a dramatic romantic comedy, sprinkled in with a dash of Sept. 11 for shock value.
