Megalopolis

This weekend, Megalopolis, the newest film from Francis Ford Coppola releases in theaters. This movie takes place in the city of New Rome (a redone New York City) where a young socialite is caught in the middle of a feud between the Mayor of the city and a brilliant architect trying to turn the city into a state-of-the-art utopia. Francis Ford Coppola is known for making The Godfather and Apocalypse so of course after those two films, I am interested in anything he puts out.

This movie is just too much. This movie is Francis Ford Coppola going all in with his ideas with absolutely no restraint and it definitely shows. The movie tries to tackle so many ideas about greed, moving in the future, learning who you are and so many others that I couldn't pick up on while trying to wrap it all up in this cinematic Shakespearian drama. This movie runs for about 2.5 hours but I had no idea what was going on for any of it. I've never seen a film like this that tries to say so much while actually accomplishing so little. There are so many different plot lines going on with a political coup, a feud between the mayor and Adam Driver's character, a romance with the Adam Driver character, and a plot to take over the largest bank in the city and none of them really stick out as the primary plot of the story. Many of the plots do not connect at all with each other. It seems like Coppola had all of these different ideas he wanted to tell but his vanity and artistic vision got in the way of telling any sort of coherent story. There are several scenes where Adam Driver's character goes into a sort of trance that completely lost me in the film. This movie is like trying to look at a piece of art that has all sorts of symbolic meaning to it but you have no idea what it is. Even after seeing this movie, I'm not sure I could give a coherent summary of the plot. A lot of the acting performance just feels a bit off too. It seems like a lot of the younger actors weren't really sure how to play the symbolism within the script so some come across as this over-the-top grandiose stage play-like performance instead of acting in a movie. Coppola financed this entire movie himself and thus had no one to hold him accountable and reign in his crazy ideas.

There were a couple of positives about this movie. The cinematography was done very well just in the way different scenes were shot and how the setting looks as a whole. The setting was also very cool with these big-scale sets like the Colosseum. The plot was largely incoherent but the film itself looked great. The cast was also pretty solid with actors like Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight, Shia LeBeouf, and Aubrie Plaza. A lot of them just didn't really know what to do with the script.

Overall, this is a very colorful and confident film but the actual plot gets lost behind the artistic vision and visual style of the movie leaving the audience having no idea what is going on.

Score: 4/10 Grade: D Recommendation: Skip it