Or, how Francis Ford Coppola lost his mind

By Daniel Correa

Megalopolis is not a film, it’s an incoherent series of events whose ideological themes are derived from the same delusional primordial soup that makes up the 85-year-old Coppola’s mind. 

Megalopolis has been out for three months and if you have paid any attention to its reception, then you know that it has been received poorly. It flopped at the box office, receiving only 13 million dollars worldwide on a 130 million dollar budget. It has been panned by critics, with some going as far as to question if the director, famed director Francis Ford Coppola, who directed such film classics as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, is suffering from dementia. And there have even been allegations made by crew members that Coppola kissed random female extras, on set, to “get them in the mood.”

I didn’t plan on going to see the film originally. I’d heard that the film was supposed to be Francis Ford Coppola’s “Magnum Opus,” but it was a complete box office failure, and that its storyline was universally mocked for being terrible nonsense. However, I heard a film critic refer to it as a Neil Breen film with a budget, and that is when I knew I had to watch the film and review it. 

To get a voice of expertise, I invited Lia Sullivan, head of the Filmmaking Club here at Field, to watch the film with me. We met up at the AMC, bought popcorn and drinks, and what we watched was one of the craziest films of 2024.

Megalopolis is set in 2024 in an alternate universe version of New York City called New Rome. In this universe, everything resembles the culture and art of the Romans, but it’s all done in the guise of the 21st century, so you’ll have gladiator fights in a coliseum and people texting on iPhones and wearing contemporary high fashion with Roman laurels all in the same scene. The story is a modern-day adaptation of the Catilinarian conspiracy (a real-world conspiracy that occurred in 63 BCE during the Roman Republic), and many of the characters are based on figures who were involved in the conspiracy. For example, our protagonist, the Übermenschian architect Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver, and who Lia told me “Did okay. But there were some moments that were very robotic.”) is supposed to represent his ancient namesake and famed Roman General and Dictator Gaius Julius Caesar, and his other namesake Lucius Sergius Catilina the head conspirator of the Catilinarian conspiracy. The main antagonist, Franklin Cicero (played by Giancarlo Esposito) whose surname and his role in the film is a direct parallel to Marcus Tullius Cicero, the famed Roman statesman and the man who stopped the Catilinarian conspiracy in real life by extrajudicially executing all the conspirators. The rest of the characters are either based on actual historical figures, or they just have Roman-sounding names.

 The film begins with a thesis presented to us on a marble-colored PowerPoint slide pretending to be a title: “Our American republic is not all that different from old Rome. Can we preserve our past and all its wondrous heritage? Or will we too fall victim, like old Rome, to the insatiable appetite for the power of a few men?” So right off the bat, Coppola is comparing America to Rome, which is a lazy trope that has been completely overdone. Artists have been drawing parallels between the current political and social climate of the United States and that of Rome near the end of its Republic for a while. It’s an overdone comparison, and the fact that it is the basis of the entire film does not bode well for the remainder. 

The film then introduces us to our main character, Cesar Catilina; Cesar can stop time (an ability that is never explained or elaborated on, he just has the ability for reasons) and he contemplates the totality of New Rome while overlooking it from one of his skyscrapers. After that, we are introduced to the main antagonist of the film: Franklyn Cicero, the mayor of New Rome and the enemy of Cesar. 

Cicero believes that the architecture of New Rome should be utilitarian and should be used to help the people by giving them shelter, comfort, and entertainment. But Cesar believes that architecture should be used to inspire and create great art and shouldn’t be limited to the scope of mortal kin. This is the main ideological conflict of the film, with Cicero asking how a city that looks like someone asking an AI image generator to make a “futuristic city” is supposed to house a population of millions and Cesar responding with broad platitudes about how art and fails to answer basic questions like: “how will the plumbing system work in your Utopia?”

Cesar is the nephew of Hamilton Crassus III (played by Jon Voight, and based on the real historical figure of Marcus Licinius Crassus, an ally of the real Julius Caesar, who was the richest man in Rome at the time), who, similar to his historical namesake, is the richest man in New Rome, and owns the largest bank in the world. 

The actual conflict of the film revolves around the bank as Wow Platinum (yes that is her name, and she’s played by Audrey Plaza) Cesar’s ex, and Clodio Pulcher, Crassus’ other nephew (played by Shia LaBeouf) try to steal Crassus’ bank away from him and also kill Cesar in the process, because Wow Platinum wants revenge for him dumping her.

Throughout the film, Cesar epically owns Cicero through his unmatched artistic rhetorical skill in arguing how awesome and important his architecture will be in uplifting the people of New Rome. Julia Cicero, Mayor Cicero’s daughter, is impressed by Cesar’s vision, and the two fall in love and have a child named Sunny Hope Catilina (the names in this film are so dumb.) A Soviet Satellite falls on New Rome, and you can tell that this was the moment during the writing process when 9/11 happened. The rest of the film is Cesar trying to build his Megalopolis, but Clodio and Wow try to stop him. In the end, Wow and Clodio are stopped, and Cicero and Cesar make amends, with Cicero admitting that Cesar was right about Megalopolis.

Okay, now that that’s over; does this film live up to the hype? Is it a Breen film with a budget? Yes, and yes. This film was abysmal, but abysmal in such a bizarre and unique way that can only be made by a man with exceptional talent gone incredibly mad by his ego and possibly dementia. The plot of the film isn’t a plot, it is a loose membrane of disparate and completely unrelated concepts, references to art, history, scientific ideas that are only tangentially related, and the weirdest and most unexplainable politics known to man. The clearest ideological parallel that Megalopolis has is with Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead; both are about an architect who is fighting for the creative liberties of the artist to the detriment of the general public, both have extremely individualistic ideological slants to their message, and both stories presume that rich people have the generosity of heart to recognize and reward great art with money and social capital. 

However, there is a clear concern and altruism towards the poor that is present in Megalopolis that is absent in any of Rand’s works. In Megalopolis, great artists like Cesar will take care of the poor and unfortunate of society, while with Rand any poor person who asks for help from society deserves to starve. 

I believe that Megalopolis doesn’t have any particular agenda, and much like the rest of the film, its ideological themes are derived from the same delusional primordial soup that makes up the 85-year-old Coppola’s mind. It becomes increasingly clear why the film is in the state it is when you realize that most of the script was written over almost fifty years and all the footage was shot only two years ago. Fifty years of development hell will do a lot of damage to a script, since not only do the opinions and outlooks of the directors change over that time, but the script begins to bloat and plot lines that were left unfinished twenty years beforehand can be left unfinished in the final product. This is certainly what happened with the whole 9/11 allegory Soviet Satellite falling to Earth since it happens in seconds, and then it is resolved with Cicero just fixing everything, so the tension completely dissipated from a plot line where a satellite just falls into a city. “The script was so bad you might’ve thought it was all improv.” Lia said“I was like, how do you work on a script for so long and not proofread, or read it back? The order of events completely made no sense.”

The main problems with Megalopolis are that the script is so outrageously poorly written that none of what Coppola is saying with the film can be taken seriously, plot lines are brought up and dropped at random, and the historical allegory it uses barely works. Megalopolis is supposed to be Coppola’s magnum opus, when this film easily beats The Godfather III as one of the worst in his filmography.

But is it enjoyable ironically? Absolutely! But, you’ll be laughing at the scenes that demand you to take them seriously. That is what makes it like a Breen film with a budget, the stone-faced seriousness that the film has for scenes that are so absurd, stupid, and convoluted that they can only be responded to with laughter. So as I was in the theater watching the disasterpiece that is this film unfold in front of my eyes; I could only conclude that the critics were right.

After the credits rolled we and the seven other people who were in the theater left, Lia and I started discussing the comedy of errors that we just watched. “It was pretty weird, not much plot, just kind of things happening. It was very strange.” The film utilizes CGI heavily for its background and effects. While I have no experience working with digital effects, Lia does:  “The effects were so bad! That scene where they were on the clock, I was looking at the background, and I’ve done CGI before, and I could see the buildings background in the background were just completely unrendered. They were just models, they didn’t even incorporate the color scheme into the background. The clouds look like they were drawn in Photoshop and then added to the scene.” 

In the end, both of us agreed on one thing, “I think Coppola should see a doctor, maybe.”

Overall, I’d say if you have some spare time, and you want to laugh at something absurd and overly conceited, I would recommend Megalopolis to you. If not, then I would give this film one star for its terrible writing, acting, directing, and effects. 

Thank you and good night.