Francis Ford Coppola is regarded as one of the great film directors. His track record proves that case: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now are all at the top or near the top of most people’s greatest movies ever made list. Not having a major release for some time now, there has been some excitement about his new film, Megalopolis, a passion project over 40 years in the making. This mix of dystopian future, Roman mythology and the current political climate in America, with a strong cast, should be well worth a cinema visit. I can tell you now, don’t bother. This is a bloated, confusing mess of a movie and one of the worst, if not the worst, of the year.

Cesar Catilina is a brilliant designer and visionary who wants to bulldoze the slums and replace them with Megalopolis, a utopia of beauty and calm. Yet his vision is being halted by the unpopular Mayor Cicero, who wants New Rome to stay as it is, and others scheming to take control of the city, like Clodio, Cesar’s cousin, and Wow Platinum, a TV reporter who wants the wealth and fame that could be attributed to the city.

Let me just say first off that there are moments when you can see the genius of Coppola as a filmmaker. His cinematic eye does produce some fascinating shots, which most directors would be very envious of. However, to compliment these images, you need a strong script, and this script is awful. Written by Coppola, who also put up the money for the £120 million budget by selling some of his wineries, this tries to mix Fritz Lang’s classic silent sci, Metropolis, with the novel The Fountainhead as well as using the Roman story, The Catalinian Conspiracy, as Coppola could see the comparisons between the fall of Rome and the current problems within the corridors of power in the United States.

We get a muddled, overstuffed, and self-indulgent mess that strings never pull together to make a whole. There are flashes of ideas and half-cooked subject matters, from political intrigue to corruption to a murder mystery that never gets a satisfactory conclusion. We get characters who never come and go within the story and don’t help with plot development. There are moments you can see Coppola wants to capture those glory days of The Godfather, but this was never going to be that ambitious or even intelligent enough.

The film starts with a toga-induced party that looks like the film will turn into Caligula but heads down the path of following the strange Cesar, who can stop time and who wants to see a future for New Rome as one of calm and serenity. He battles with the Mayor while others plot around him, and having a relationship with the Mayor’s daughter, Julia, doesn’t help matters. Yet none of this helps with any form of entertainment. This is po-faced, with no light moments, using a string of bad ideas that seem to have come from a nightmare that Coppola may have once. Nothing gels. Even a sequence where Cesar goes to a party and seems to be having some form of drug and drink hallucination is bland and uninteresting.

The dialogue is often jarring, and to add insult to injury, there is a moment when Cesar quotes Hamlet’s To Be or Not To Be speech that is both pointless and incredibly annoying and serves minimal purpose other than to say, hey, we know Shakespeare!

The film is brimming with names, from Dustin Hoffman to Jon Voight (the first time they have both starred in a movie together since Midnight Cowboy, although they don’t share any scenes. A missed opportunity) to Jason Schwarzman and his mother, Talia Shire. The best of the bunch is Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum, who plays the whole thing like you understand this isn’t great but seems to be enjoying herself, and Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia, the only one level-headed enough to see the perils ahead. Adam Driver as Cesar is, quite frankly, poor and doesn’t seem to even try, while Shia LeBeouf is unbearably annoying as Clodio, going high camp and creepy at the same time.

Megalopolis is a disaster, and one of those films doesn’t even fall into the category of so bad; it’s good. It is just so wrong. After last week’s The Substance, which took risks and succeeded, this takes risks and falls flat on its face. It’s time to put away the director’s chair, Francis, and hang on to the memories of when you made great movies.

1 out of 5

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Starring: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Natalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LeBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal

Written by Francis Ford Coppola

Running Time: 138 mins

Cert: 15

Release date: 27th September 2024