Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ Is a $120 Million Hot Mess

Great artists need not be great their entire careers—a fact borne out by Francis Ford Coppola, whose 1970s run (The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now) is arguably the finest ever, and whose subsequent output has been wildly mixed and contains no additional undisputed masterpieces. Megalopolis, which Coppola has endeavored to make for four decades and which he financed himself, is a stab at recapturing his former glory, full of epic visions and grand themes and gestures. Such ambition, alas, begets a daring saga that boasts far more moments that stumble than soar. It’s a mess that can be admired—but a mess, nonetheless.

Megalopolis, which hits theaters Sept. 27, dreams of a better tomorrow by looking to yesterday, with Coppola mining the past—Art Deco and German Expressionism, archaic car radios and handwritten letters, and iris shots, canted angles, split screens, and painterly set backgrounds—in an attempt to envision the future. It’s a noble effort, yet one that doesn’t work, as his marriage of the old and the new (including florid animation and CGI effects) is ungainly and often unsightly, his frame awash in glittering golden hues, opulent set design, and outlandish overlapping imagery that turn the proceedings garish and Neil Breen-grade affected.

From a purely aesthetic standpoint, Coppola’s first feature since 2011’s Twixt is a sloppy hodgepodge marked by the occasional gorgeous sight (such as two lovers kissing in death-defying fashion on steel beams suspended over a metropolis) and a cornucopia of clunky compositions that strain futilely for splendor.

Megalopolis’s story is set in a 21st-century Big Apple that’s known as New Rome because, as the director’s script makes obvious, it’s a sci-fi parable about the fall of an empire. In this third-millennium city, there’s a war raging between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), the chairman of the Design Authority, and mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Cesar believes Franklyn is a regressive “slum lord,” and he sparks a confrontation by demolishing what appears to be a subsidized apartment building in order to construct Megalopolis, a utopia that he plans to erect with a magical organic substance known as Megalon. The specific nature of this material is never explicated, but it has vast potential to create an eco-paradise where everyone gets a garden, homes expand alongside their inhabitants’ families, and people travel by moving walkways.

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A spiritual descendant of The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark, architect Cesar has the power to literally stop time because he’s an artist, and his forward-thinking designs are a threat to the status quo represented by Franklyn, who in his prior post as a prosecutor sought (and failed) to convict Cesar for the murder of his first wife.

Despite Franklyn’s hatred of his adversary, his beloved daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) falls in love with him, becoming his romantic partner and his muse. This rankles Franklyn as well as Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), Cesar’s TV journalist girlfriend, who responds to his rejection by getting her hooks into Cesar’s banker uncle Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), an aged horndog with untold wealth. Crassus has four children who incestuously screw each other, and of them, the most conniving is Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), a long-haired cross-dressing weasel who covets Julia and comes to loathe his cousin Cesar.

Coppola conveys all of this through helter-skelter plotting and attendant visuals, with Megalopolis lurching, spinning, and floundering about as if unmoored from convention, continuity, and the Earth itself. It’s a series of home-run swings, and when they connect, they’re powerful. Too frequently, though, they magnificently whiff.

The same goes for the film’s performances, led by Driver in a turn that seesaws between arm-waving, toe-tapping flamboyance, blasé curtness, and pretentious speechifying. Cesar is a motley assortment of ideas, emotions, and tics, and while Driver commits fully to the part, he can’t overcome the action’s drastic shifts in register—up to and including a sequence in which he’s resurrected by Megalon and, for a time, resembles some space-age version of Aaron Eckhart’s Two-Face from The Dark Knight.

Laurence Fishburne provides heavy-handed narration as Cesar’s driver and Talia Shire blabs about string theory as his “crazy” mother, all as Plaza awkwardly tries to chew scenery and Emmanuel strives to be the film’s innocent and pure heart. Dustin Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, James Remar, and other notable faces pop up now and again in throwaway roles, contributing to the kitchen-sink feel of the entire affair.

Coppola indulges in every whim imaginable, be it Caligula-style revelry, 2001-esque transformations, and circus-style drug trips. From a purely logical viewpoint, Coppola’s conception of the future is nonsensical (why, for example, are chariot races back in vogue?), and from an allegorical angle—Megalopolis bills itself as “a fable,” after all—it’s transparent and unsubtle.

The director’s boldness does sporadically pay off, yet those sparse instances are drowned out by a tidal wave of absurdity, as when Plaza’s gold-digger wraps herself in Cesar’s coat and remarks that it smells just like him—a combination of sandalwood, citrus, and “sweet male memories.” Megalopolis’ operatic over-the-topness is intentional, as are the many flattering parallels it draws between Coppola and Cesar, two dreamers committed to paving a hopeful and pioneering path for themselves, their art, and the world at large. The film’s sincerity, however, clashes with its stabs at comedy, highlighted by a late boner gag involving Voight. Only LaBeouf, as a sorta-kinda Trumpian rabble-rouser, strikes the right balance between the earnest and the insane, his Clodio a petulant wannabe tyrant motivated by jealousy, greed, and ego.

Megalopolis doesn’t lack for imagination, filling its 138 minutes with all manner of befuddling and beguiling madness: a vestal virgin elicits donations from bigwigs with a song, and is then outed as a fraud; a surprise attack via crossbow; and Cesar doing an impromptu rendition of Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech. For every Shakespearean flourish, Coppola delivers lame humor (going down on her boyfriend, Wow tells Cesar that he’s “anal as hell” while she’s “oral as hell”) and garish sub-Myst panoramas marked by fuzzy cityscapes, crystalline home movie projectors, and giant clocks because, you see, Cesar is obsessed with time.

Midway through its New York Film Festival IMAX premiere, the film stopped, the house lights came up, and an in-theater actor approached a microphone to “ask” the on-screen Cesar a question—a device intended to reinforce the idea that dialogue is the key to saving civilization. Unfortunately, the auteur’s Megalopolis is too silly to start a serious conversation.