Director/Screenplay – Francis Ford Coppola, Producers – Michael Bederman, Francis Ford Coppola, Barry Hirsch & Fred Roos, Photography – Mihai Milimaire, Jr., Special Photography – Ron Fricke, Music – Osvaldo Golijov, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jesse James Chisholm, Visual Effects – Ghost VFX (Supervisor – Kevin Chandoo), Narwhal Studios, Rise | Visual Effects Studios (Supervisor – Oliver Schulz), UPP (Supervisor – Viktor Müller) & Wild Capture, Special Effects Supervisor – John Baker, Production Design – Beth Mickle & Bradley Rubin, Visual Concept Designer – Dean Sherriff. Production Company – American Zoetrope.
In present-day New Rome, the acclaimed architect Cesar Catalina, who has won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the miracle substance Megalon, proposes rebuilding the city into a utopia. This is opposed by the mayor Franklyn Cicero who instead wants to build a casino. Cicero’s daughter Julia becomes intrigued by Catalina and the two become lovers, despite the opposition of her father.
Francis Ford Coppola is without any question one of the great American film directors. Any director who had films like The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather Part II (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979) under his belt would be assured of a place in film history. Elsewhere, Coppola’s output has tended to the uneven. Throughout the 1980s, Coppola was making films of considerable stylistic brilliance and often massive ambition – One from the Heart (1981), The Outsiders (1983), Rumble Fish (1983), The Cotton Club (1984) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) – even when they were being middling box-office successes and financial flops. These sat alongside unabashedly commercial works such as Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), The Godfather Part III (1990), Jack (1996) and even a John Grisham adaptation with The Rainmaker (1997), while Coppola’s output this side of the 2000s has been the often head-scratching likes of Youth Without Youth (2007), Tetro (2009) and Twixt (2011). (See below for a list of Francis Ford Coppola’s other genre films).
Coppola conceived Megalopolis way back in 1977. His interest was in the Catalinian Conspiracy of 63 B.C. where Sergius Catiline stood for consul and attempted to take over the Roman senate and overthrow against Marcus Tullius Cicero. He was forced to flee Rome and mounted an army that marched on Rome in 62 B.C. but was killed during the army’s defeat. Over the next forty years, Coppola attempted to mount Megalopolis as a modernised retelling. There were various points throughout the 1990s where sets were built at Cinecittà in Rome and Coppola had cast the films and was rehearsing with various actors. I remember reading an article about his proposed vision in the early 2000s and was thinking “I really hope he gets the chance to make this, it sounds mind-blowing.” However, after 9/11, Coppola is said to have shelved the project, seeing no interest in it.
Coppola was finally able to mount Megalopolis after the sale of his Rubicon Estate winery in 2021, which brought in enough money that he could finance the film himself. The budget ended up ballooning to $120 million. The production was beleaguered by problems throughout shooting, including reports that Coppola was changing his mind on a daily basis, misconduct allegations against Coppola and then a scandal over faked reviews appearing in the trailer. Megalopolis premiered at Cannes to wildly divided reviews. The film did make a theatrical run but only ended up making $13.7 million worldwide, making for a loss of over $100 million on Coppola’s part.
Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel survey the city – an example of the film’s extraordinary sets
Megalopolis arrives on screen an extraordinary mixture of wild ambition and flawed epic. It is the sort of film we expect of Francis Ford Coppola, maybe around the period of The Cotton Club and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I can kind of see why audiences didn’t go for Megalopolis – it is not the type of film where what it is about can be summed up in a one-sentence pitch. It is more like a European film of the 1970s where a narrative line is not always clear. Precisely the type of filmmaking that seems to have all but vanished from cinema screens in favour of recycled IP product in the 2020s. The quoting of everybody from Plutarch to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Marcus Aurelius and Sappho, even dialogue from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599), gives us a work that is considerably elevated above the rest of the multiplex fare.
The problem with Megalopolis is that it was some way into the film – the better part of an hour – and I was still trying to work out what it was about. Coppola’s films since the 2000s all have a confused quality to them, especially Youth Without Youth and Twixt, where you are spending more time trying to work out what is going on than actually watching the film. Megalopolis falls into the same failing – it is often a sprawling epic of untidy plot ends left all over the place. It could be said to be almost a version of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943), which concerned the architect Howard Roark who refuses to compromise his vision for a building to those who sought to restrict him. Maybe The Fountainhead combined with the Utopian visions in the latter sections of the H.G. Wells film Things to Come (1936) and a good sprinkling of Romeo and Juliet (1597).
Megalopolis seems to be taking place in some kind of Alternate Reality where New York City is depicted as a present-day version of imperial Rome. It is still clearly identifiably New York with visible locations such as the Empire State Building, the New York Library, Times Square and various bridges. And yet it is one where gladiatorial combat and chariot races are held in an arena, where costuming is based on Roman togas, of Vestal Virgins, PG-rated orgies and Saturnalia is celebrated as a holiday.
Roman circuses in the present-day
Even if you are not always clear what is going on, Megalopolis is an extraordinary film visually. The production design work is amazing and the scale of the film is something we don’t get these days. Francis Ford Coppola loves tricking it out with visual effects. Adam Driver seems to have an inexplicable ability to halt and manipulate time – a few scenes in, we see him pausing the explosion of a building as it is detonated – and at other times he seems able to see into the future, although I wasn’t sure if that was him just having architectural dreams. (There were times it kept reminding me of the indulgence of Nicolas Roeg in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) the uncut version).
There are amazing visions of hands reaching out from clouds; of the satellite coming down and the silhouettes of dancing figures being illuminated on the sides of buildings by the flames; images of Driver and Nathalie Immanuel dancing between the girders of skyscraper construction; and a montage of visions of the future utopia that Adam Driver is planning to build. And that is in between the dazzlingly choreographed dance sequences that Coppola stages for us.
One thing you can say that Megalopolis is about is a film about artistic vision. To this extent, Coppola draws from The Fountainhead with the protagonist as an architect who pushes his utopian vision further than the ordinary conservative money-aligned people around him can handle, whereupon they seek to reign him in or, as here, even shoot him (where the magic substance Megalon seems to cause Adam Driver to make a complete recovery despite the bullet leaving a coffee cup-sized hole in his head. The term Megalon kept making me think either of the nemesis that turned up in Godzilla vs Megalon (1973) or maybe that Coppola was thinking about the Transformers). Coppola has a long history of taking on enormously ambitious projects that ended up bankrupting his American Zoetrope studio – with the dual flops of One from the Heart and The Cotton Club – so in many ways Megalopolis is an autobiographical work – of the architect/filmmaker who perseveres with a powerful artistic vision despite the money people trying to reign him in.
Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel dance atop construction girders
It is also worth comparing Megalopolis to its namesake of sorts Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Both are works about building an amazing city of the future. If Megalopolis were Metropolis, then Adam Driver’s character would be the industrialist Joh Fredersen who was the story’s villain, while Shia LeBeouf’s populist rabble-rouser (who here is portrayed as a Donald Trump-like figure and at one point is seen speaking to crowds while on a swastika-like podium) would become the hero Freder. Brigitte Helm’s Maria would be a combination of Nathalie Emmanuel’s love interest and, after Maria is transformed into a robot, would become Aubrey Plaza’s tv host. On the other hand, Metropolis was a film rooted in Marxism and finding a common ground between bourgeoisie factory owners and the exploited working classes. Coppola shows the working classes in revolt but has no real sympathy for them – his views are entirely with the vision of the Howard Roark-styled Cesar Catalina and the emotional triumph of the film is the completion of Cesar’s utopia, the very one that Lang saw as meaning enslavement for workers.
The film has a massive cast. In many regards, it is Francis Ford Coppola at age 85 enjoying what may be his last hurrah. There are several other actors who were Coppola’s contemporaries present, including an 87-year-old Dustin Hoffman, who you wish had gotten more screen time than he does, and an 85-year-old Jon Voight who gives the impression he is beyond it and often doesn’t have much clue as to why he is there. It is also a film of character drop-offs – Dustin Hoffman seems to vanish halfway through during a building collapse, while there are other characters played by D.B. Sweeney, James Remar and Jason Schwartzman that one had difficulty identifying, if at all. Probably sometime in the future, Coppola will release a five-hour director’s cut that will restore many of these aspects.
Francis Ford Coppola’s other films of genre interest are:– the re-edited Russian sf film Battle Beyond the Sun (1963); the psycho-thriller Dementia 13/The Haunted and the Hunted (1963); the leprechaun musical Finian’s Rainbow (1968); the time travel fantasy Peggy Sue Got Married (1986); Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992); Youth Without Youth (2007) about a man who is miraculously rejuvenated; and the ghost story/vampire film Twixt (2011). Coppola has also produced work within the genre from George Lucas’s debut feature THX 1138 (1971), the alien visitor tv movie The People (1972), the ghost story Haunted (1995), the tv mini-series White Dwarf (1995) set on an alien world, Andrei Konchalovski’s epic mini-series version of The Odyssey (1997), the X Files ripoff tv series First Wave (1998), the Hawaiian supernatural revenge film Lanai-Loa: The Resurrection (1998), Agnieszka Holland’s Catholicism and miracles drama The Third Miracle (1999), Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers (2001) and Jeepers Creepers II (2003), and the eccentric Hal Hartley monster movie No Such Thing (2001).
(Nominee for Best Director (Francis Ford Coppola) and Best Production Design at this site’s Best of 2024 Awards).
