by Nick Nitkowski

Francis Ford Coppola is one of those names in filmmaking that when you hear the name, you can immediately think of a well-known film that he’s made. Most commonly known in his repertoire is the “Godfather” Trilogy or “Apocalypse Now.” Now he’s back with a brand-new passion project, Megalopolis, of his that he funded himself. A bold risk to invest your own money into a project you’re passionate about. I’ve seen plenty of such projects succeed and go on to become well-known Ips. But on the flip side, I’ve also seen many passion projects fail and become forgotten. It’s not pleasant and weighs heavily on the creator, but it’s a risk that one must take. So where does the great Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project fair? 

Well, it’s unfortunate to say, but I believe that this particular passion project will soon become one of the ones that will be forgotten. Worse than that, I believe that this film is going to perform poorly at the box office and bomb. With a $120 million price tag on it, I think it’ll be considered lucky to make half of that back. Why do I feel this way about the film? Allow me to explain.

This movie was a chore to get through. This film was a two-hour and eighteen-minute stylized mess. The movie follows a man named Caesar (Adam Driver) who seeks to create a new vision of the future in the form of a utopia called “Megalopolis”, but the current men of power seek to do anything and everything they can to stop it from happening in the hopes of maintaining their power. That should give one an idea of the kind of message the film is trying to convey, but the problem lies in its execution.

The setting is in a fictitious dystopian world that combines the style of Ancient Rome with modern America thus indicating subliminally that America could fall just like Ancient Rome if the powers that be don’t alter their current course of action. A little on the nose implying that America could suffer the same fate as the Roman Empire. While not very subtle, it still could have worked if the overall narrative wasn’t so muddled and messy to the point where it felt like the movie had a lot to say, but in attempting to do so didn’t really say anything. 

That being said, this movie was such a slug to sit through. Because the movie wasn’t doing a great job narratively, that means that the dialogue also suffered. While the film has some interesting visuals, the movie relies mostly on dialogue, and nothing interesting was ever said. I was so bored watching this film that I genuinely contemplated leaving the theater just to get home and in bed a lot sooner than expected. But If I had done that, I would have missed out on what I consider to be the most interesting thing in the whole movie.

This was a very brief moment in the film and it’s a unique experience that I can confidently say will not be available to the average moviegoer when this film releases. There was a moment in the middle of the movie when the screen went black. When that happened, the theater lights turned on. I was confused by this thinking that the movie was over. However, I still heard dialogue coming from the screen, so the movie was still going. So, I thought that it had to be a theater glitch where they didn’t time the theater lights to turn on at the right time, which has happened to me before. But then footage of Adam Driver’s character showed up on the IMAX screen taking up only a small fraction of the screen. At that point, a random guy showed up and set up a microphone and faced Adam Driver’s character who was also facing him and the guy was lip-syncing to the dialogue of an off-camera interviewer. In short, they intentionally got someone in the theater to stand in front of the screen and pretend to interview Adam Driver’s character on the screen and the lights came up so that we could see him. It was a very brief moment, but it was my biggest takeaway from that whole experience. I heard that this segment will most likely be cut out of the film because they obviously can’t do that for every showing of the film in the country.

Once that moment was over, it was back to sluggish storytelling and boring dialogue from the cast. This movie actually features a lot of familiar faces. Some of which I didn’t expect to be in this movie, much less on a silver screen at all. I mentioned that Adam Driver is the star of the film, but some of the other cast members include Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Shia LaBeouf, Lawrence Fishburne, and Jason Schwartzman just to name a few. Out of all of these actors, the one I found to be the hardest to take seriously throughout the entire film was Shia LaBeouf. He’s supposed to be one of the antagonists of the film, but the things that he does and the wardrobe he wears make it so difficult to take him seriously as a threat.

Overall, “Megalopolis” is a very lackluster passion project that grossly missed the point it was trying to make and greatly lost sight of its message to the audience. The dialogue stemmed from boring to absurd in most cases and by the time the movie reached its climax, it was met with laughter from the audience I saw it with, and not in an intentional or good way either. Should you choose to watch this movie, I have a good feeling that you’ll know the exact moments I’m talking about. I genuinely foresee this movie bombing badly at the box office this weekend. It’s not something I wish upon the film but for a movie that wants to discuss the future, I don’t see it having much of one. I can only hope that it finds its audience, potentially on a streaming service somewhere, but I was not one of them. It’s not the glorious utopia for me and I think it should have strived to be better.

⅖ stars