“What is time except to curve past and present around us?” Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) asks the January 6-coded throng demanding his Megalopolis be destroyed. Much like Megalopolis (2024) itself, it’s a question posed as universal and yet only really scrutable at a hyper-personal level. Catilina is the “visionary architect” in the city of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. New Rome, as the Big Apple is here retitled, is on the brink of a debt crisis. With the aid of a benevolent lending institution helmed by Cesar’s uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), New Rome will turn to either Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who wishes to build a casino to harvest revenue, or Catilina, who, under the auspices of his Design Authority, seeks to build Megalopolis, the city-within-the-city of the future constructed out of his patented, renewable, and infinitely flexible new material, Megalon. Complicating this clash of local powers are Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter who falls for Catilina, Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), the savvy newscaster who takes up with Crassus, and Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), Catilina’s jealous cousin who raises a populist cult aimed at the halls of power.
Megalopolis, as has been widely reported, has been in the works since 1982, the year when the box office flop of One From the Heart (1982) would make irrefutable the failure of Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, and the final burning of 10 years worth of industry credibility accumulated through his historic 1970s run. Coppola had looked to the studio patronage system of Classical Hollywood as a model for his studio of the future, attempting to forge a viable path for artistic production as the New Hollywood’s steam sputtered out. As his movie business revolution ran his credit to the bone, he scripted a version of the Ancient Roman Catilinarian Conspiracy — wherein outsider Sergius Catiline attempted to overthrow the reigning consuls in the waning days of Republican Rome — transposed to present-day New York, reimagining Consul Cicero as Mayor Ed Koch and Catiline as earth-shifting urban developer Robert Moses. Coppola’s failure to change Hollywood was all but apparent by the time of Megalopolis’ first draft, and he sat atop the ruins of his studio and imagined a world in which the will of a powerful visionary could thwart a corrupt system, in which a man could rise from the ruins of his past to build a future worthy of his creative promise.
In the wake of One From the Heart and the bank-enforced auctioning away of his dreams, he made a number of films attempting to reckon with his past, unable to conceive of the future as anything other than hopelessly lost. In 1987, on location for one such film, he lost his eldest son, Gian-Carlo, to a boating accident at age 22. From Gardens of Stone (1987) through Jack (1996) and Twixt (2011), he would find himself summoned back to this rupture in his space-time continuum. Along with his sense of time, grief collapsed his sense of proportion. The loss of his son coupled with the loss of his dream as the present’s ceaseless forward march trod once bright potentials deeper into the muck. In Megalopolis, an entire civilization teeters on the brink of oblivion.
Coppola recently told the host of the podcast The Daily Stoic that his grief over Gian-Carlo’s death was “a sentence of 30 years.” 30 years from 1987 would place Coppola not in 2019, at the announcement of his resumption of production on Megalopolis, but rather at the onset of another, coeval project: the re-cutting and re-release of several of his films from this middle period, beginning with The Cotton Club: Encore (1984/2017) and continuing most recently with One From the Heart: Reprise (1982/2024). These films, documents of years spent toiling in failure and grief, grappled with time’s immutability. A fortune in wine money backing him, he subjected these films to his detached reimagination. A few minutes of restored footage here, slightly altered sequencing there: these changes, while minute, rob the films of their grounding in a moment of futility in Coppola’s life. Against this backdrop of endless digital malleability, Megalopolis recommenced production: Coppola’s ark of the future borne out of the remade shards of his past.
Cesar Catilina, to the contrary, continues to live with his ghosts. The circumstances of his wife’s death are never clarified. Cicero accuses him of poisoning her, mentioning a missing corpse. Julia observes him making a pilgrimage to her bedside, where she appears in a coma, only for a new angle to reveal him caressing thin air. A flashback late in the film recalls Night of the Hunter (1955), showing a woman in a car sinking into cold water, her long hair drifting upwards as she’s pulled further from the light. This is not the first time such an image has found its way into Coppola’s filmography. In Twixt, the lead character, an aging artist, is forced to re-witness the scene of his daughter’s death in circumstances identical to Gian-Carlo’s. Sinking and rising between future and past, if Coppola claims to be freed of his grief, his lead just tries to keep his head above water.
The ghosts that haunt Megalopolis are manifold. A screenplay written, rehearsed, filmed, scrapped, and rewritten over and again across four decades, it’s a patchwork of traces, a canvas of threads untied and hastily tied. The story of Nush “The Fixer” Berman (Dustin Hoffman) is perhaps illustrative. Nush, evidently a larger part of a previous draft of Megalopolis, minces alongside Mayor Cicero for certain scenes in the film’s first half. Later, he offers to kill Clodio as a favor to the mayor. We next hear of him when Clodio and his accomplice are standing next to his statue. “That old fool tried to muscle you out of politics…” the accomplice clucks, cueing a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flashback of Nush letting out a yell as he’s swallowed by a cloud of dust in a building collapse. Who Nush was, why his loyalty to the mayor led him to take aim at Clodio, and precisely how he met his downfall will be left to the imagination, or perhaps to Megalopolis: Reset. Nush is just one of many of the film’s untethered elements, skating just ahead of time’s impending dust cloud.
History, one of the Megalopolis’ ostensible subjects, emerges scrambled by the film’s 40-odd years of development. An old Soviet satellite, likely a relic of the script’s Cold War origins, crashes into New Rome about two-thirds of the way through the film. A previous version of Megalopolis, which also contained the satellite crash, was interrupted mid-shoot by the events of September 11, 2001. Coppola would later reflect on his script’s prescience, and the new film retains the crash as a structural pivot point, though one rather devoid of meaning: Catilina is building Megalopolis before, and continues building it after. Layers of this American-Roman palimpsest accumulate. Coppola models Catilina after Robert Moses, and yet the immigrant communities opposed to Moses’ urban developments are here represented as the right-wing mobs of January 6, 2021. All that remains of the immigrant opposition emphasized in an earlier draft of the script is a single turbaned leader; panning to the crowd, a digitally inserted red hat is thrown into the sky.
As grief poses a freestanding invitation to collapse time, so too, it would seem, does its absence. Occasionally, Megalopolis indulges this vertigo. One of the first of his generation to embrace digital cameras, Coppola here seems manic for the possibilities to fragment, multiply, and distort his images. The scene of Crassus and Wow’s wedding, for instance, recalls the buzzing activity of Connie’s nuptials in The Godfather (1972), but dialed here for the ADHD sensation of a thousand cameras recording at once. Coppola flashes between jugglers and trapeze artists, sexual intrigue with Wow, dottering Crassus, and even a cameo from his granddaughter, one-time viral sensation Romy Mars, who appears as a teen journalist. Fictional popstar Vesta Sweetwater (Grace VanderWaal) arrives in a Megalon dress designed by Catilina, who describes “a million tiny cell cameras” transmitting what they see to her other side, rendering her nearly translucent. There’s a business straining at the edge of representation. The signal is corrupted; there’s too much interference.
The wedding scene feels alive, brimming with more random potential than any in-theater stunt still to come. Under the influence of strong drink, the Stentorian tone dictating much of the proceedings is allowed to slip. Previously reciting Hamlet — a preposterous proportion of Megalopolis’ dialogue is spoken in quotation — Driver is here allowed to improvise. In the colosseum’s seedy corridors, Julia attempts to restrain the imminent episode she senses in Catilina, and the two commence a theater game pantomime, her pulling on his invisible leash until, with an imagined knife, he severs it, disappearing into the debauched evening. In the ensuing montage, footage is sped up, slowed down, and reversed, bokeh lights snap into focus, and Catilina’s image is multiplied by infinity mirrors. Coppola’s penchant for practical effects complements his digital experimentation: the scene culminates with a shot from above Catilina, stretched out on a dial, an array of arms rotating counter-clockwise behind him as he convulses in seizure. Suddenly, in the colosseum, Vesta’s dress begins projecting footage of her and Catilina having sex. In his introduction, Coppola spoke about the film telling him how to make it. Megalopolis, chimera script authored over half a century, seems to speak most truthfully in these vertiginous montage sequences, when the cavalcade of stray images and moments seem to exclaim in discordant chorus: one’s business with the past is never over.
But the film places a premium on the discourse of its words, not its images. As mentioned, the screenplay quotes with abandon. There is incessant talk of “humanity” — its burdens, proper aims, potential for greatness — and yet the humans populating the film appear either as ants or colossi. An initial flirtation between Catilina and Julia finds the later posing contrapposto behind him. “I want to be your Statue of Liberty,” she tells him. The cast’s awareness of the script’s camp pomposity exists on a spectrum from Plaza to Emmanuel, the latter performing with all the comic awareness of a late Game of Thrones season. Dramatic scenes suffer under direct sunlight, when these bronze busts are forced to stand amidst real people, New Romans among New Yorkers. One almost flinches when these characters swear, so buried are their human emotions beneath layers of didacticism.
This distance from real people informs the politics of Megalopolis, which could be summed up as a humanism so broad and meaningless as to encompass both Ayn Rand and David Graeber. “Don’t let the now destroy the forever,” Catiline sloganeers, and Coppola’s exclusive focus on the eternal truths of antiquity leaves ample room for contradictions unpressured by the material world. At a certain altitude, Coppola’s influences are bound for collision, but it’s balanced on the digital I-Beams suspended over New Rome where they’ll meet, not a worker in sight to trouble his supreme perspective over the city. Catiline preaches democratic participation (“We want every person in the world to take part,” he announces in the climax) yet holds sweeping unelected powers. Like Robert Moses, he destroys low-income housing with impunity to build a dream city for his dream population. He’s building a world for people, he insists, and yet popular will is depicted as fickle and despotic. The clash of these ideas is not absent, but their resolution — “When we ask these questions, when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia,” Catilina proclaims — is so devoid of texture as to be formless.
Coppola’s visual imagination is undiminished, but it appears unevenly spread across Megalopolis’ two hours and change, leaving certain important beats curiously unadorned while lending intrigue to platitudes elsewhere. The final act employs a triptych framing device indebted to Napoleon (1927), a film Coppola was instrumental in bringing to America during the Zoetrope glory days. In one of the film’s worst humanist tropes, New Roman Saturnalia unites the three Abrahamic religions, and yet the rapid succession of images (dreidels, stockings, Arabic scrolls) across three adjacent panels gives a sense of roiling unease to the tenuous unity. Toward the climax, an Elvis Presley impersonator belts out “America the Beautiful” while shots on either side declaim the hostile takeover of a bank. These simple contrasts are less impressive than their execution, and yet the fragmented spectacle opens heretofore unseen pathways into Megalopolis, displaying the film’s various modes of address side-by-side in order to glimpse an endlessly multifaceted object.
Over the desk in Catilina’s office, a polyhedron made of Megalon hovers and rotates. Its many glassy faces reflect his memories, largely of his wife. Behind this desk, by day, the office is Design Authority pandemonium. Julia twirls Catilina on a rolling chair, and he tosses around a foam basketball while organizing theater games. “Try to retain shape!” he tells a wavering human pyramid of his collaborators, knowing well they’re bound to collapse. “We were in a musical making a musical,” choreographer Kenny Ortega would later recall of the making of One From the Heart at Zoetrope Studios. “We might as well have been singing our hearts out.”
As Megalon plunges Catilina into the past, it must also bear him into the future. Eventually, Coppola must admit that debate alone is no utopia, and muster his resources toward demonstrating the city of his dreams. Tri-paneled graphite sketches morph into colored illustrations before achieving final form in a cheaply accomplished CGI theme park. Cars have been replaced with Jurassic Park-esque gyrospheres, walkways with airport-esque moving walkways. Swerving and spiraling taupe forms describe the roller coaster-like exoskeletons of domiciles shaped like petals blooming and made out of pure sunlight. Infinitely flexible, renewable, and ugly in a way that defies easy description, Megalon is the perfect match for Coppola’s context-free digital departure from human temporality. It stretches, twists, and turns without reason or resistance. There’s no need to retain shape when collapse carries no risk. Watching Catiline and Julia play house in their hastily animated Megalopolis kitchen, two things are evident: no one has lived here, and no one will live here.
Coppola has been obsessed of late with bequeathing a cinematic future to the next generation. Returning to Megalopolis, however, one does not imagine the children of the future debating the merits of Cicero’s presentism versus Catiline’s idealism, or examining populism through the lens of Clodio. Megalopolis’ pleasures are most abundant when it recognizes that its highest stakes exist within the film itself. “Time must not have dominion over my thoughts,” Catiline chants over a late montage, as fragmented images of Megalon clash with memories of his dead wife and his mother as a younger woman. There are the traces of performances mostly scrapped, as in Malick, but more impressive is the Borgesian labyrinth of time creased and folded and re-creased over 40-some years. As the images split, dissolve, and accumulate, one glimpses the true multiplicity of Megalopolis: not the sleek epiphany it wishes to cast off, but the beleaguered dog of a half century of ink, sweat, and tears. One can’t turn the page on the Zoetrope story, because it doesn’t end.
DIRECTOR: Francis Ford Coppola; CAST: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; IN THEATERS: September 27; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 18 min.
Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.
