“When does an empire die? Does it collapse in one terrible moment? No, no… But there comes a time when its people no longer believe in it.”
I can say with a high degree of certainty that I have never seen a film quite like “Megalopolis,” and I doubt that I ever will again. While that comment sounds like high praise, being unique and original is not necessarily the only bar for quality.The director, Francis Ford Coppola, has had a tumultuous career in Hollywood, with his first major breakthrough coming from co-writing the 1970 Best Picture winner “Patton” (which is also the favorite film of former U.S. President Richard Nixon.) He then directed the critically acclaimed “The Godfather” trilogy, winning two awards for Best Picture and the 1974 Oscar for Best Director for “The Godfather: Part II.” He also won the Palme d’Or twice, the top prize at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in the south of France, in 1974 for “The Conversation” and for 1979’s “Apocalypse Now.”
Beginning in the 1980s, his career took a major downturn, and despite a brief resurgence in the early 90s with 1988’s “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” and 1992’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” he never fully recovered. He had at least one more idea for a film about a city in ruins after a tragedy being rebuilt by a singular visionary that would rival even the Roman Empire, but he had to abandon production in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks because of numerous similarities.
In 2019, when Coppola announced his intention to finally complete his long-gestating passion project “Megalopolis” by financing the 120 million dollar budget with proceeds from his family’s vineyards, the filmmaking world waited with a degree of uncertainty. He entered the film into competition at Cannes in 2024, and the reviews that came out were extremely polarized. People were divided on whether this film served as a true testament to cinema or an abomination created by an out-of-touch director.     
He managed to get Lionsgate to distribute the film, but it became a box office bomb after only grossing 4 million in its opening weekend. The theater where I saw the film only had another 10 people watching the movie, and the other showtimes did not fare much better. Even though the film may be a complete mess, I still found some redeemable qualities, despite the ludacris and confusing story.
The plot follows an architect named Cesar Catalina, played by Adam Driver, who is the head of the Design Authority for the city of New Rome. He has previously won a Nobel Prize (they never mention the discipline; Coppola must not have thought that far) for creating a material called “Megalon,” and he also possesses the ability to stop time with his mind, which is also never explained. He tries to renovate a destroyed neighborhood to create his utopian view of the future made of Megalon, called “Megalopolis.” He feuds with the mayor, Frank Cicero – played by Giancarlo Esposito, who you may recognize as Gus Fring from “Breaking Bad” or as Moff Gideon from “The Mandalorian” – over the future of their city, and Catalina falls in love with Cicero’s daughter named Julia, played by Nathalie Emmanuel. 
There is also another subplot, which might be even more insane than the main story. Aubrey Plaza stars as the bafflingly named Wow Platinum, an economics reporter who is in love with Catalina and decides to seduce and marry his uncle, Hamilton Crassus III, played by Jon Voight, in order to gain control of his lucrative banking shares. She then teams up with Claudio,  Crassus’ estranged nephew (played by Shia Labeouf in a quite terrible performance) to take over the company. They also have a weird, pseudo-incestuous relationship that I was extremely repulsed by.
Despite these problems, the film does still have some redeeming qualities. One of these is the use of filming techniques from German-Expressionist cinema. It was the film movement that helped birth the main inspiration for the film, the 1927 masterpiece “Metropolis.” From the exaggerated use of shadows during the meteor shower to Catalina’s surreal and disturbing breakdown in the colosseum scene, the frenetic energy possessed in every shot helps to keep your attention throughout the entire film.
In the end, this feels like 40 years of half-baked ideas crammed into one movie, made by a crew who were too afraid to ever just say no. It means that for better or worse, this film is the exact and singular vision of one man, and for that, it deserves some recognition and praise. If that vision was any good is what you, the viewer, must decide. While other films may be “well-made” and “coherent,” they are not original enough to name their characters “Wow Platinum,” so that must count for something. Overall, I did somewhat enjoy my time with “Megalopolis,” yet my rating is a tepid 3/10.