Cult Classic; Not Best Seller
I saw Megalopolis on Friday night in a theater with a grand total of 3 other people, and I wasn't surprised that it was so empty since many of the reviews have panned the film. Francis Ford Coppola even put out a trailer that incorrectly quoted some of the bad reviews for The Godfather and Apocalypse Now because he knew they would come for Megalopolis as well.
However, I loved it. Megalopolis is a movie made specifically for me.
Actually, that's not true. Megalopolis is a movie Coppola made for himself. All movies are passion projects, but what makes Megalopolis different is that it was made to please an audience of one and that one person happens to be one of the best directors of all time. A film made for someone like that will inevitably be indulgent.
When it comes to the visuals, this is all to the benefit of the movie. Like Baz Luhrmann's Great Gatsby or Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the movie has an aesthetic that feasts the eyes. It's hard to imagine that Coppola could have made Megalopolis anywhere near as beautiful a spectacle if he had made this 40 years ago when he first started work on the idea. But one thing that is undeniable is that Megalopolis is a visual glory.
However, when you also call it a fable, it removes even more of the normal storytelling guardrails, and what you get is a web of interconnected historical and literary analogies. This aspect seems to be what most of the Megalopolis-haters focus on: events happen, but there is no plot. Coppola never explains the whys, and it drives some people nuts. "A high school senior project with $100M" who made a movie where "nothing happens," as one reviewer put it on YouTube.
It's true, this movie is polarizing. Even now, looking through the reviews on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, the movie is at 5/10, a mix of haters, lovers, and people who liked but didn't understand what they saw.
Megalopolis is not a simple story about good guys who can stop time and bad guys who wish they could stop time, chasing after a MacGuffin with the power to stop time. Megalopolis is hard to describe because it's several stories told simultaneously. If you are familiar with the Catiline Conspiracy and how it led to the First Triumvirate and the fall of the Roman Republic; if you are familiar with Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged; if you know the names Robert Moses, Walter Gropius, and the book The Power Broker; if you know Hamlet and Prospero; if you know Plutarch, Seneca, or the name Livia; if you said yes to any of those, this movie is for you too. Coppola leaves gaping plot holes that you have to fill in with those stories, or just fill in by talking to other people who do know those stories. Ironically, Coppola's Caesar, played by Adam Driver, tells the audience directly that "It's not about the thing, it's about starting a conversation about the thing." Megalopolis is an art film; the meaning is found in the conversation, not the thing.
But if you are not familiar with any of those stories I listed above, then there is no plot, and the movie makes no sense outside of the analogy. This was not made for you.
Why did I love it?
What Megalopolis captures as it stops time, is the self-aware ethos of 2020's late-modernism, a culture that knows it is at the precipice of a transition and screams stop.
New Rome's New York skyline is an opulence of the past, nearly (2)100 years old, and finds it easy to build a casino for now but impossible to build something better for the future. This friction is personified by Cicero, the mayor of New Rome, played by the always great Giancarlo Esposito, a politician trying mightily to speak for people now but who is being swept along the current of history being directed by Caesar Catilina, the genius engineering architect, who could stop time whenever he wanted. While Caesar and Cicero are in opposition to each other, they are not enemies; they have different interests, but they have to work together like the present and the future do.
In life and Megalopolis, the opposition stands in front of you, but the enemy stands behind you. Platinum Wow, played by Aubrey Plaza — who drips off the screen — is a villain worthy of our times. High on envy and jealousy, she is the status addict who would burn the town to be the queen of ashes. Aided and abetted by a Nietzschean nihilist in Clodio Pulcher, played convincingly by Shia LaBeouf, this duo could be called Glory and Power because they serve to whisper a warning to those still animated by Old Rome's Virtuous Vices.
Megalopolis ends on a hopeful note; it is in many ways a counterfactual history. New Rome seems to escape a second fall of the republic. In truth, the history played out differently: first, Cicero villainizes Catiline, then kills him and all of his supporters. Only for Pulcher to then turn around and exile Cicero himself. This puts Julius Caesar and Cicero on opposite sides during the First Triumvirate, and well, that ends badly for everyone in Old Rome.
We have a transition to make; we do have a choice, but we can only make that choice if we begin to admit that the time of choosing is at hand and start that conversation. I hope Coppola is right, and in time, Megalopolis kicks this conversation into the open.