Megalopolis | 2024
Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia Cicero and Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina in Megalopolis. Courtesy of Lionsgate.
Pre-production for Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis began in 2001. Based on a screenplay Coppola began in the 80s that got put on the back burner, this is a film that has been decades in the making, delayed by 9/11 along with mounting debts leading Coppola to eventually bankroll the production himself to the tune of $150 million. It has all the trappings of an epic disaster, and while it has divided critics and failed to make an impression at the box office, Megalopolis is arguably one of the most ambitious and fascinating films of the 21st century.
Adam Driver stars as Cesar Catilina, a visionary architect in New Rome, a kind of postmodern nation-state born out of what was once New York City. Catilina dreams of building a new Utopia in the center of New Rome called Megalopolis using miraculous new technology, but the mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), opposes him at every turn and sees Catalina's plans as a dangerous pipe dream. Catalina is in love with the mayor's daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who finds herself torn between her lover's idealism and her father's pragmatism while a series of unscrupulous bureaucrats, oligarchs, and agitators seek to exert their own influence on the future of New Rome.
There's a lot going on here—Coppola has stuffed Megalopolis with a lifetime's worth of ideas, leading to many reports of the film being "messy." And while it is certainly unwieldy, it feels almost unfathomably major. This is a grand-scale work by a filmmaker with nothing left to lose who's laying it all out on the table, contemplating not only the future of cinema but the world itself and his place in it. Say what you will about Coppola the man (and there is plenty that should be said), but his legacy is one that is impossible to ignore, and Megalopolis feels like his attempt to grapple with it on the grandest possible scale.
It's as though the silent era has come crashing into the digital age. The spirit of Fritz Lang hangs heavy over it - Metropolis is the obvious foundational text here, but Coppola is spinning it into something that feels thoroughly modern yet thrillingly timeless. This kind of uncompromising, visionary work is a rare thing; worthy of comparison to Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language in the way it so boldly pushes the cinematic language into new territory. There's a spark of madness at its heart that is at once garish and glorious, a decadent folly that will inevitably draw comparisons to such disparate artists as Fellini and the Wachowski Sisters, and yet it remains resolutely its own unique vision.
It isn't difficult to see why people hate this. It's ungainly, often bewildering, and almost doggedly uninterested in its audience. But it is truly one of a kind - a film for the ages from a titan of the craft, a lion in winter both licking his wounds and gazing off into an uncertain future. This is what cinema is all about.
