Movie Review: Megalopolis (2024)
Megalopolis has some massive ideas and ambitious production design but the final product does not live up to either.
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The best thing I can say about Megalopolis is that it is clear that Francis Ford Coppola made exactly the movie he wanted to make for better or worse. He clearly has a lot to say about the state of the United States and the direction it has gone over the last decade, however he throws so many things at the viewer throughout the just over two-hour runtime that nothing actually sticks.
The conflict is very muddy. Adam Driver's Cesar is a dreamer who wants to build New Rome into a utopia of sorts while Giancarlo Esposito's Cicero wants to keep things the same. Also thrown into the mix is Shia LaBeouf's Clodio (that feels wrong but that's how IMDb spells it), who is clearly meant to ask the question "What if Donald Trump was a millennial?" but even that is not clearly explained. There's the concept of a great moment in the movie where there's a card game between Cesar and Cicero where they debate their political views but since neither character is developed nothing quite feels earned.
If the narrative shortcomings weren't enough, the visuals do not live up to the aspirations of the production design. The CGI is, at best questionable, and the cinematography is severely lacking. The editing is also a little off with clear examples of ADR and continuity issues between scenes.
Despite being billed as a cinematic experience with an IMAX run, this is not worth running out to a theater to see. The ideas here are far too big for a movie which leads to about an hour and a half of the runtime in the middle feeling disjointed and meandering. Perhaps a miniseries where each idea that Coppola definitely wanted to explore serving as its own episode would have better served the whole thing but the film is barely watchable in its current form.
★★
Megalopolis
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Writer: Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Grace VanderWaal, Shia LaBeouf, and Dustin Hoffman
Rating: R
Release Date: September 27th, 2024
