Spoilers think the future needs to tone it down. A lot.

Sometimes you start a film and find that you’re just not into it. For some reason, you’re not vibing with the execution. At that point I either stop and leave it for when I’m in the proper headspace or risk it and see if the film can change my mind. This is biased of me, and probably unfair but a great film can engage you even at a disadvantage. After a few more minutes I realized I would never be in the mood to watch this and I decided to just eat the two-hour plus feature. Scalpel, please.

(Credit: Lionsgate)

Megalopolis (2024) was written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. In this alternate time, New York is New Rome, where the authoritarian city mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) controls the city with an iron fist. Opposing him at every turn is the idealistic artist Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) in charge of designing a new face for the city. Standing between them is Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), daughter of the mayor but in love with Cesar.

There’s subtlety and then there’s spoon-feeding information to your audience. The film uses the old and tried tricks of news reports and newspaper headers. To a degree, I could accept that. But when we casually overhear a bystander saying, “there goes the brilliant artist Cesar…”, it just feels like you tied all the exposition to a rock and are hitting the audience with it. Getting to know the characters is rather strange when we feel like we just joined a story already in progress.

Julia works as our point-of-view character. She’s not given her own agenda, that is her only purpose seems to be to fall in love with Cesar. She leaves her vapid party crazy friends to help his man’s dreams. There’s this scene where her friends already drunk and falling over each other, arrive at a party in a limo while kids with dirty faces watch behind a chain link fence. Julia gets dropped by a police cruiser whom she thanks for the ride. The message is that she’s more down-to-earth, but the problem is she’s still going to the exclusive fancy party.

And then there’s our over-the-top crazy characters. We have Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) as an in-your-face reporter that ends up mixing with the celebrity crowd when she becomes engaged to Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight). Aubrey Plaza can be amazing, but even here she feels miscast although she’s playing a character that would normally suit her. On the other side of the spectrum we have Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf) who is our resident trickster antagonist. He ends up fabricating a scandal to defame Cesar.

The casting feels like a bunch of pieces from different jigsaw puzzle boxes forced together. Even Laurence Fishburne is here playing Fundi Romaine who’s basically Cesar’s driver and sometimes narrator of the story. Underutilizing an actor of his caliber and giving him such a menial role should be fined. The dialog is lifted from Shakespeare and other classic texts, sometimes changed to fit the scene or patched into the diverse musings of Cesar. At some point the conflict is resolved, somehow.

Not recommended. It’s a grandiloquent feature that wants to say something grand but ends up feeling hollow. The result is a headache that doesn’t have the decency to wrap up under two hours. I haven’t gone into the messy production and the allegations brought against the director during the filming, but you can probably find those anywhere else. Keep it off your watchlist.

That will do for now.