Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola decided to sell a significant chunk of his legendary wine empire to self-fund a $120 million sci-fi epic at the age of 85, and that fact alone is more move-the-needle exciting than 90% of the franchise fluff clogging up our multiplexes. In an era where every frame of a blockbuster is focus-grouped into oblivion, Megalopolis arrives like a transmission from a parallel universe where the 1970s "New Hollywood" era never ended and directors were still allowed to go absolutely, spectacularly insane. It is a film that feels less like a structured narrative and more like a philosophy lecture delivered by a man who just accidentally ate a whole bag of gummies.

I caught this on a Tuesday afternoon in a nearly empty IMAX theater where the guy three seats down from me was eating a Tupperware container of cold spaghetti. The smell of cheap marinara actually felt like the perfect unofficial 4D scent for "New Rome," a city that looks like a gilded, decaying version of Manhattan held together by CGI spit and prayers.

The Architect of a Madman’s Utopia

The plot, if you can call it that, centers on Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina, a Nobel Prize-winning architect who has the literal power to stop time. Driver, who previously worked with the high-concept weirdness of Leos Carax in Annette, plays Cesar with a brooding, Shakespearian intensity that suggests he’s the only person who actually knows what movie he’s in. He wants to build "Megalopolis" using a magical, sentient material called Megalon, which looks like shimmering gold Jell-O. Standing in his way is Mayor Franklyn Cicero, played by a wonderfully exhausted Giancarlo Esposito, who prefers the status quo of concrete and corruption.

What makes Megalopolis so fascinating for a contemporary audience is how it rejects every modern rule of "prestige" filmmaking. Most big-budget dramas today are obsessed with being "grounded" or "gritty." Coppola goes the opposite direction. He embraces the artificiality of the LED Volume—the same virtual production tech used in The Mandalorian—but uses it to create dreamscapes that look like 1920s German Expressionism crashed into a Vegas casino. It’s messy, it’s occasionally ugly, and it’s frequently as subtle as a brick to the forehead, but I couldn't look away.

Characters From a Different Century

While the central conflict between Cesar and the Mayor is the spine, the movie is stolen by the supporting cast, who seem to be competing in a "Who Can Chew the Most Scenery" Olympics. Aubrey Plaza, who has been on an absolute tear lately in projects like The White Lotus, plays a financial news anchor named Wow Platinum. She is a chaotic delight, leaning into the campy, vampy energy of a 1940s noir fatale. Then there’s Shia LaBeouf as Clodio Pulcher, a populist provocateur who looks like he’s dressed for a Coachella-themed Roman riot. LaBeouf’s performance is genuinely unhinged, providing the film with a jolt of unpredictable energy every time it starts to sag under its own weight.

There’s also Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia Cicero, the Mayor’s daughter caught between the two men. While her role is a bit more conventional, she serves as the audience surrogate, looking at the madness around her with a mix of awe and "what is happening?" energy. Even Jon Voight shows up, playing a character who basically functions as a walking satirical punchline about the 1% of the 1%. At one point, he wields a gilded bow and arrow in a scene that I am still trying to process three weeks later.

A Relic of the Future

It’s easy to look at the box office numbers and the polarized social media discourse and label this a disaster. In our current streaming-dominated world, we’ve been conditioned to value "smoothness" and "watchability" above all else. Megalopolis is the antithesis of a "smooth" watch. It’s a jagged, hulking monument to one man’s ego and imagination. It’s a film that asks what our society will leave behind, and it does so while featuring a scene where Adam Driver recites the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy in its entirety for seemingly no reason other than he felt like it.

Apparently, Coppola has been tinkering with this script since the 1980s. You can feel those forty years of accumulated ideas bursting at the seams. It touches on everything from the January 6th Capitol riots to the fall of the Roman Republic, all while trying to be a romantic drama and a sci-fi thought piece. Does it succeed at being all those things? Not even close. But I’d rather watch a visionary filmmaker swing for the fences and hit a bird in mid-air than watch another committee-designed sequel that takes zero risks. It’s a movie that deserves to be argued about over drinks, not scrolled past on a home screen.

Ultimately, Megalopolis is a beautiful, bloated wreck that I’m genuinely glad exists. It isn't a "good" movie in the traditional sense—the dialogue is clunky, the pacing is erratic, and some of the CGI looks like a screensaver from 2004. But it possesses a soul and a singular voice that is increasingly rare in the $100 million+ budget tier. It’s a film for people who love the process of cinema as much as the product. You might hate it, you might find it hilarious, or you might find it profound, but I guarantee you won’t forget you saw it.