When no studio will finance your pet project and you have to sell your assets to finance it yourself perhaps you should be concerned as to why no one would give you money.
Francis Ford Coppola is without a doubt a highly gifted director, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now to name but two of his past films that are now regarded as classics, but to sell your winery business for $120 million in order to finance, probably one of the poorest films of the year, would indicate that, either, his expectations for Megalopolis in terms of how the public and critics would receive it were wide of the mark, or the man has more money than sense.
A review is easy to write when a films plot is easy to understand sadly Megalopolis is a film that makes very little sense. The chances are you’ll come out of it none the wiser, in terms of the story, than before you went in.
Megalopolis is set in New Rome, which looks remarkably like New York, sometime in the future. Here Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who has seemingly invented some kind of new material that you can not only build buildings with but also repair your face after its been shot off, is in confrontation with the city’s Mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). To add further to their dislike of each other Cesar is in love with the Mayors daughter, Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel).
In amongst this Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), Cesar’s uncle, is married to an actress called Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) who is having a secret relationship with Cesar. Crassus’s son (Shia La Beouf) hates Cesar and wants him dead. Oh and Dustin Hoffman pops up at various random intervals for no great apparent reason and the whole thing is narrated by Cesar’s butler, Fundi Romaine (Laurence Fishburne sounding if he would rather be doing anything but narrating Megalopolis).
That’s the simple part of the plot but throw in subplots that go absolutely nowhere, a Russian Satellite is falling to earth and Cesar can pause time, and it all adds up to what amounts to a head scratching mess.
On the plus side, and there’s not many, the visuals are stunning. If you have to see Megalopolis try and see it in IMAX.
