@thearmag3ddon here with yet Another Movie Review that You Didn’t Ask For:
It’s a bit ironic that Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s triumphant return to le cinema magnifique, deals with the ability to manipulate time (I think—more on that later), because what was a 2-hour-plus runtime felt like it would never, ever end. And I’m being 100% serious here—I was questioning my sanity. At one point, I asked myself with honest-to-gods truth, “Is this movie ever going to end?” Fearing that somehow I had been transported to some version of purgatory, stuck watching endless, nonsensical, disjointed scenes for what could turn out to be a million years—until Dante arrived to rescue me from this new Circle of cinematic Hell.
Which, now that I think about it, would have been a better story. But I think that’s already the plot of Mystery Science Theater 3000, ironically, so… never mind.
So yeah, I won’t even bury the lead too much here: Yes, everything you’ve heard is true. Megalopolis is one of the most WTF (but not the worst) movie experiences of 2024.
Megalopolis is perhaps an exercise in hubris? It’s hard to tell. There’s definitely a posturing toward extravagance and grandeur in the visuals and it definitely is ambitious, I’ll give it that, but for me, the biggest issue was the lack of connective tissue between its many disparate character threads. Actually, I hesitate to even call them “threads”—it’s more like a random collection of snippets of… something. It felt like a poor attempt to create from the Greek Tragedy template—but, like, you bought the template on Temu or Wish.com.
It draws inspiration from a wide array of sources, everything from the Catilinarian conspiracy of ancient Rome to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, with a dash of fairy tale aesthetic (although I don’t know which one). But instead of blending these influences into a cohesive experience, they remain as separate profiles—each standing on its own without meshing together to form a unified, richer whole. This fragmentation leaves the movie feeling disjointed rather than enhanced by its inspirations, which are eclectic and thus needed more connection built in.
It’s dripping in Shakespeare (who DEFINITELY bought the Premium Greek Tragedy Template Subscription), but in Shakespeare, we get lyrical wit, poetic expression, or clever observations to fill these moments—even from minor-ish characters like “Hortensio #5.” But here, we get clunky, often blunt, and uninspired lines from a cast that feels like it was pulled in for… well, it’s like this…
This is the least of my quibbles, but a quibble nonetheless, and probably only exists because the movie is lacking any kind of meaningful substance—I found the inclusion of so many noteworthy actors more of a distraction than an enhancement. It can be pulled off—literally, in Shakespeare (see 1993’s Much Ado About Nothing), but here, none of it popped. The actors felt like they were just there for facetime, relying on audience recognition without giving us anything more than that. I swear, at times I thought Coppola was simply doing Dustin Hoffman a solid to help him with a house payment or some debt.
My apologies, I got sidetracked a little bit—much like the movie—but back to the dialogue. It’s an issue because the film begs for you to notice what it’s trying to emulate, with its title cards etched in marble and a main character named Caesar. The problem is, when you lean this hard into the grandeur of it all, the dialogue needs to back it up with the wit and eloquence you’d expect. TL;DR: there was a mismatch of tones that didn’t work for me. Instead, we’re left with clunky, uninspired lines that fall flat in a film desperately trying to project literary sophistication.
Which leads me to what I think was actually my biggest issue with Megalopolis—it dances awkwardly between the fantastic and the grounded, never giving us clear distinctions between the two, thus making the entire piece a muddled mess of madness—which, I guess, you might appreciate on some not-even-the-good drugs. Basically, it doesn’t feel intentional, but rather unfocused (though it’s Coppola, and it’s Greek/Roman inspired, so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt that this was intentional). However, there’s no 4D chess going on here—more like checkers after the losing player tips over the table.
It opens with a genuinely interesting and fantastic concept, which in any other story would be the central push and pull of the plot, but then it mostly ignores that concept for about 90% of the film, continuing the trend of us not deserving the things we actually want—like a Young Bruce Wayne walking the Earth CW TV show, like Caine from Kung Fu, learning from all the great masters in how to be a detective and martial artist, but instead we got Gotham. The fantastic only shows up as a sort of deus ex machina to solve a moment or push the story forward (again, a feature of Greek plays, BUT COME ON.) And…sigh, Story. I don’t even want to call it that—so let’s just say, it gets to the next scene when nothing else could instead.
Again, in all its wannabe Greek Tragedy coded glory, a large chunk of the movie moves from the POV of our, I think, protagonist (played by Kylo Ren himself) to a menagerie of secondary and side characters who, with whatever development they receive here, get quantum-leaped into completely different character traits in later scenes. In particular, there was a confusing scene where our star from BlacKkKlansman is seeing something that looks fantastic, but then Missandei from Game of Thrones, who can apparently see things beyond reality, doesn’t see the fantastic thing. And… sigh.
So yes, like I said, acknowledging the roots of the story, I can see where there was an attempt to manufacture an experience greater than all of the influences involved. However, that doesn’t automatically mean the attempt worked. A noble failure, perhaps, but solidly a failure. There’s a concept in writing where sometimes you must “kill your darlings,” and ironically, Coppola ignored this very plot point intended for Oedipus by his parents at his birth—leaving all the elements that should have been sacrificed for the good of the story. But I guess that didn’t work out for them either, now that I think about it, which kind of leads me to this next, somewhat complicated thought…
The thing about this movie is, no matter how many misses it has for me, no matter how many things I think it could have corrected, shifted, or fixed just based on my observations about how to make it actually coherent, any of those suggestions would have made it less… interesting? In the other 2024 timeline that we diverged from in 2016 when the Large Hadron Collider went full throttle—where both Prince and Tom Petty are still alive and which also happens to probably be the more boring, pandemic-less one—it might have been just another tale of a tycoon gone wrong. And kind of boring? It would have been a magical realism The Aviator, which won awards mostly because you got bamboozled into thinking it was great, not because it actually was. (Shots fired.)
And of course, I’m mostly kidding, but my point is, in a way, making THIS movie here more coherent would have rendered it likely run-of-the-mill and thus, less interesting. That doesn’t, however, make it good either because as I said, I do admire sticking to the vision, but I think the vision is dead on arrival and mostly a miss.
Just like my upcoming Joker: Folie à Deux closing credits take, where some folks will try to convince you of your lesser intelligence and inability to grasp concepts that are supposedly accessible only to their Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer brains, anyone trying to tell you how amazing the message or storytelling in this movie is, is attempting to gaslight you on a level not seen since Nicole Kidman tried to convince us in 2021 that everything was going to be OK in a pandemic world simply because we could now watch Fast 9: The Fast Saga back in theaters. Like… (oh hey, full circle back to Missandei, who was also in the Fast and Furious series).
So yeah. Whew. This was exhausting, and I am spent.
As you probably know by now, I usually grade these movies on a scale of items, themes, or features relevant to the movie itself. And I had a few I was batting around, but then I realized, no. There’s something this movie needs to be graded on based on something here, but not here at all, and that is…
I give Megalopolis, 2 Megalons out of 5, but not the weirdly named material from this movie, but Megalon from Godzilla movies, WHICH, if it had appeared here would have made this movie infinitely better. Perhaps maybe in Megalopolis 2 directed by Sofia?
Oh well.
Until the next review you didn’t ask for @thearmag3ddon, signing off.