Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megapolis’ - Review Thread
Reviews:
Variety (50):
To call this garish, idea-bloated monstrosity a mere “fable” is to grossly undersell the project’s expansive insights into art, life and legacy.
Hollywood Reporter (60):
It’s windy and overstuffed, frequently baffling and way too talky, quoting Hamlet and The Tempest, Marcus Aurelius and Petrarch, ruminating on time, consciousness and power to a degree that becomes ponderous. But it’s also often amusing, playful, visually dazzling and illuminated by a touching hope for humanity.
Deadline:
Megalopolis represents a rare kind of event movie that reinvents the possibilities of cinema to the extent that, halfway through, there’s a very audacious gimmick that tears down the fourth wall in ways younger filmmakers can only dream of. Coppola breaks many of the cardinal rules of filmmaking in the film’s 138 minutes but it upholds the most important one: it is never, ever boring, and it will inspire just as many artists as the audiences it will alienate.
IndieWire (B+):
With “Megalopolis,” he crams 85 years worth of artistic reverence and romantic love into a clunky, garish, and transcendently sincere manifesto about the role of an artist at the end of an empire. It doesn’t just speak to Coppola’s philosophy, it embodies it to its bones. To quote one of the sharper non-sequiturs from a script that’s swimming in them: “When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free.”
The Guardian (2/5):
Francis Ford Coppola’s question – can the US empire last forever? – may be valid but flashes of humour cannot rescue this conspiracy thriller from awful acting and dull effects
LA Times:
In a larger sense, Coppola has moved from the cynicism of his greatest films like “The Conversation” and “Apocalypse Now” — so much power doing so much corrupting — and into something that could fairly be called utopian. I’m not sure if that’s what I want from him as an artist, but I thrill to his unbowed aspiration. He’s not going out with something tame and manicured, but an overstuffed, vigorous, seething story about the roots of fascism that only an uncharitable viewer would call a catastrophe. Rather, it feels like a city. It may be the most radical film he’s ever done. He dedicates it to his late wife, who would have smiled at the evidence of her husband still doing his thing 45 years later.
Rolling Stone (80):
Say what you will about this grand gesture at filtering Edward Gibbon’s history lessons through a lens darkly, it is exactly the movie that Coppola set out to make — uncompromising, uniquely intellectual, unabashedly romantic (upper-case and lower-case R), broadly satirical yet remarkably sincere about wanting not just brave new worlds but better ones.
Vanity Fair:
Megalopolis is too confused a film to make a truly odious or dangerous point. (Though the ending of the Vesta plotline is somewhat alarming.) This is the junkiest of junk-drawer movies, a slapped together hash of Coppola’s many disparate inspirations.
The Telegraph (80):
Aubrey Plaza is fantastic in this full-body sensory bath movie which follows a struggle for power among the elites of New Rome.
Screen Daily (40):
But the amount of stray ideas and themes that are introduced, then abandoned — such as the fact that Cesar has the ability to stop time — leave Megalopolis feeling like an unwieldy mess. Cesar and Cicero’s showdown over New Rome is handled in terribly disjointed ways, and the attempts by supporting characters to grasp power add to the picture’s cluttered construction. In recent years, few auteurs have dreamed as boldly as Coppola has with this film, but some visions, as Megalopolis’ characters discover, are doomed to failure.
The Wrap:
After four decades in the making, “Megalopolis” plays as a frustrating and paradoxical affair. The film is expertly assembled and sleepily directed all at once; it wows with its imagination and erudition all while leaving you little more than bemused.
Collider (4/10):
Much like the city being built in the film, it’s all more interesting in theory than it ever is in actuality. Now that we will all have the chance to take it in for ourselves, the greatest revelation is that there just isn’t that much there to see.
Written and Directed by Francis Ford Coppola:
An accident destroys a decaying metropolis called New Rome. Cesar Catilina, an idealist architect with the power to control time, aims to rebuild it as a sustainable utopia, while his opposition, corrupt Mayor Franklyn Cicero, remains committed to a regressive status quo. Torn between them is Franklyn's socialite daughter, Julia, who, tired of the influence she inherited, searches for her life's meaning.
Cast:
- Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina
- Giancarlo Esposito as Mayor Franklyn Cicero
- Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia Cicero
- Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum
- Shia LaBeouf as Clodio Pulcher
- Jon Voight as Hamilton Crassus III
- Jason Schwartzman as Jason Zanderz
- Talia Shire as Constance Crassus Catilina
- Grace VanderWaal as Vesta Sweetwater
- Laurence Fishburne as Fundi Romaine
- Kathryn Hunter as Teresa Cicero
- Dustin Hoffman as Nush "The Fixer" Berman
- Sonia Ammar
- Chloe Fineman
- Madeleine Gardella
- Balthazar Getty
- Bailey Ives
- Isabelle Kusman
- James Remar
- D. B. Sweeney
