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eanyone who loves cinema owes francis ford coppola a lot…including honesty. His ambitious and serious new film loudly dedicated to him late wife Eleanor, there are flashes of humor and excitement. The scene of Jon Voight with his bow and arrow shoots a witty dart. The film’s heavily furnished Art Deco theatricality sometimes makes for an interestingly self-aware spectacle, like an old-fashioned modern production of Shakespeare. And surely Coppola’s failure is far more interesting than the functional successes of lesser directors—mediocre ones who aim low and almost hit the bottom edge of the target.
But to me, it’s a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and confusingly shallow movie full of high school truths about the future of humanity. It’s both hyperactive and lifeless, littered with some terrible acting and uninteresting, cheap-looking VFX work that achieves neither the texture of analog reality nor a completely radical, digital reinvention of existence. Yet this sci-fi conspiracy drama-thriller clearly inspired by Catiline Plotters of Ancient Rome, asks a valid question. The US Empire, like the Roman Empire, like any empire, cannot last forever. Has the moment of America’s decline and fall arrived?
We’re in a kind of retro-futuristic New York, very much like the present, with flashy news stories announced on billboards with tapes and video on the buildings. But the internet seems to have evolved away from being prominent and social media is clearly a thing of the past.
The town’s most famous resident is the visionary Nobel Prize-winning architect and scientist Caesar Catiline, played by a very cocky Adam Driver, getting drunk at social events and tormented by the death of his wife in a car accident for which he had just escaped prosecution. He is supposed to have invented a new building material, miraculously strong and malleable, called megalon, and this discovery seems to have given him secret powers to control time and space.
The federal government has given him permission to demolish entire sections of the city for his utopian construction project: Megalopolis. Meanwhile, the town’s mayor, Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), is furious at this arrogant man’s attitude and demands real answers to what he sees as humanity’s real needs: a living wage, sanitation, roads, schools, hospitals, not this pie-in-the-sky – -sky megalo nonsense.
Cicero’s world is shaken when his daughter Julia (Natalie Emmanuel) falls in love with Catiline, creating a clash between the Montagues and the Capulets between the old and new visions of humanity’s future. And sinister Trump banker Hamilton Krass III (Voight) is having an affair with sleazy, duplicitous TV news anchor Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza); Crassus’ sinister grandson Claudio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf) has a corrupt ambition of his own.
There are moments when Coppola seems to be channeling Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, and his dull, crude rhetoric about humanity’s potential seems to come from the New Deal era or even earlier. I found myself thinking about Chaplin’s final speech in The Great Dictator. But the last days of disco dancing in decadent Rome just seem outdated.
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There is a very powerful scene at the beginning in which an agonized Catiline climbs out of a window at the top of the Chrysler building and swings over the edge. The artificiality of the horizon works against the tension, perhaps, but it’s a bold image. Yet the scene unfolds, like the entire film, in such a way as to remove danger, believability, and believable consequences. Needless to say, paranoid intrigue, political violence and dysfunctional family dynamics are themes that this director has already tackled more memorably. But perhaps this remarkable achievement gives him the right to ignore the criticism now.
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