When you first read that, you may think that is a little egotistical for a filmmaker to embark on a film not guaranteed to make money in the current cinematic landscape. But when that filmmaker is none other than Francis Ford Coppola, then you have to be prepared to give a little bit of a leeway. After all, if the man who has brought us classic films such as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now doesn’t have the right to make something he wants to once in a while, then who the hell does.
This is the point where I should warn you that if you do go to watch Megalopolis you will leave the cinema believing one of two things: you will either think that Coppola is a genius whom people just don’t understand, or you will think that perhaps this is a movie that should have stayed inside his head.
The film is set in the city of New Rome, a city that seems to have all the mod cons of New York but embraces what life would have been like in Ancient Rome as it holds lavish orgies and even a circus for entertainment.
The highlife of New Rome support either one of two men. On one side you have Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito – The Usual Suspects), who wants the city to remain the way it is, despite its massive gap between the rich and those forced to survive daily on what they can. On the other side you have an intelligent entrepreneur named Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver – Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens), who dreams of making it a futuristic utopia where life is easy for all.
Meanwhile, you have the backstabbers like Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf – Transformers), who dreams of bringing down the men of power, and Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza – Safety Not Guaranteed), who feels she can achieve that power with sex and seduction.
With Cicero and Caesar seemingly going to war with each other, the fight becomes even more personal when while originally planning to act as a spy for her father, Cicero’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel – Furious 7), falls in love with Caesar.
If you are thinking that the plotline sounds very Shakespearian, then you would be right. There are times throughout the film where you wonder whether the plot was devised by Coppola as he read the Complete Works of William Shakespeare and decided that some parts of Romeo and Juliet and Lady Macbeth sounded cool. Where the genius comes from, for me, though is how he has turned those stories and a city like New York into a city that simply bleeds Shakespeare from its pores.
And it is there that I find the audience will be split. You may sit there and see the scale of the city and hear the poetic language used and be in awe like I was while others will view the film as a pompous piece of art that is a chore to sit through. While I did love aspects of the film, I do feel that the last quarter of the movie lost its way as the story fell away and it felt like it was completely rushed with some pretty basic CGI.
While the scale and creative side of the film does work, it does feel like Coppola fails to take full advantage of dealing with important and relevant topics like political manipulation of voters and fake media. They are brushed over in such a quick fashion you wonder why they are even mentioned in the first place.
What never falls away during the film though are the acting performances. Adam Driver commands the screen in nearly every scene that he is in and the duller parts of the film become more noticeable because he is not present.
Likewise, Aubrey Plaza steals every moment she has in the film and I am sad to say overshadows the performance of Nathalie Emmanuel. Also stepping up to the plate is Shia LaBeouf, who reminds us once again what a brilliant actor he is. His scenes with Plaza are some of the most memorable of the film – probably not a good thing when they are the villains in the piece.
Only time will tell where Megalopolis ends up in cinema history. Will it go down as one of the biggest flops of all time or will it become a cult classic? That I can’t answer, but I will say is that for everyone who walks out of the cinema thinking, Wwhat a piece of rubbish”, someone else will be thinking, “What a work of genius”.
Megalopolis opens in Phuket cinemas on the Sept 26.
4/5 Stars
David Griffiths has been working as a film journalist for over 25 years. That time has seen him work in radio, television and in print. He currently hosts a film podcast called The Popcorn Conspiracy. He is also a Rotten Tomatoes accredited reviewer and is an alternate judge for the Golden Globes Awards. You can follow him at Facebook: SubcultureEntertainmentAus