Here’s Why “Megalopolis,” The New Francis Ford Coppola Movie Starring Adam Driver, Is Even Worse Than People Are Saying
Shoutout to the two people who left the screening before the movie was even over.
Warning: Spoilers for Megalopolis.
It’s been called “a piece of shit” and “incoherent.” A cursory glance through social media will show people calling it the “worst movie” of the year, if not their lives. I am, of course, talking about Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed, multi-million dollar catastrophe Megalopolis — which I found myself watching by myself on a Wednesday afternoon.
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Megalopolis was written, produced, and directed by Coppola — who you likely know from famously not-bad movies such as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now — after literal decades of development. The cast is stacked: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, and Aubrey Plaza, to name a few. It currently has 47% on Rotten Tomatoes, which I think is alarmingly generous.
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There are many reasons to dislike Megalopolis based on tales from its production alone. Variety reported that Coppola sexually harassed extras on set, which he has denied. Shia LaBeouf was cast in the movie in 2022, well after he was sued by FKA twigs for sexual battery, assault, and infliction of emotional distress.
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Still, I sat through all 2 hours and 18 minutes of this movie, because plenty of people have praised it. The best I can attempt to summarize it is this: Adam Driver plays a genius architect named Cesar Catilina in an alternate version of New York called New Rome. He wants to build “Megalopolis” from a material he invented called Megalon. Other people don’t like this, because they’re squares stuck in the past.
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Megalon is also apparently dangerous, but this is brushed aside.
A clip of Driver’s performance has gone viral where he says, “Go back to the club, bare it all, and stalk the kind of people that you enjoy.” His line delivery is absurd, but arguably it’s not as bad as the line just before it: “You think a year of medical school entitles you to plow through the Emersonian riches of my mind?” Pretty much every line of Catilina’s dialogue is like this: The pretentious philosophical mumblings of the worst people I went to grad school with.
Watching Aubrey Plaza was my favorite part, though her character is a manipulative caricature of a femme fatale who is literally called Wow Platinum (Lily Bloom sure doesn’t sound so bad now, huh?!). At one point, she says seriously, “You’re anal as hell. I, on the other hand, am oral as hell.” I appeared to be the only person who laughed at this at my screening.
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What makes for extremely uncomfortable watching is watching LaBeouf’s character, Clodio Pulcher, have a sex scene with Platinum — given that the vibes from production didn’t exactly scream “intimacy coordinator,” especially with the allegations against LaBeouf. Pulcher is queer-coded and leads one of the most baffling subplots of the movie about egalitarianism. The residents of New Rome protest after their homes are demolished to make way for Catilina’s Megalopolis. Fair enough, right? Wrong! Populist Pulcher stands atop a swastika as he rallies the people. People wear “Make New Rome Great Again” hats and have black sun tattoos.
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Also, at one point, LaBeouf and Driver make arm gestures at each other in the style of Phoebe Buffay running in Friends for no apparent reason (there is no apparent reason to any of this).
So, do the reports of misogyny behind the scenes translate to what we see on screen? Yeah, duh, of course they do. The female body is ogled, and women touch other women in the most male gaze of ways. Women in this world are either duplicitous “sluts” or, in the case of the female protagonist Julia, ones who exist to provide love and inspiration for men. There is a scene where Catilina tells her as much; women are the muses, not the creators in Coppola’s world. If you Google “Madonna-Whore Complex,” it should lead to this movie.
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There is an entire scene (complete with song) dedicated to a self-professed teenage virgin superstar, Vesta Streetwater. Her purity is depicted as the salvation of New Rome, through crowd dialogue that is genuinely quite hard to hear (shoutout to the ADR on this movie, which is often as bad as Madam Web’s). People literally riot with the Confederate flag when it is revealed that Catilina slept with her. He is arrested for “statutory rape” and “unlawful intercourse with a minor,” which are the same thing. Psych! She’s actually 23, allegations be damned.
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Perhaps one of the most grating parts of Megalopolis is that, for all its obtuse postulation on big ideas, its magnificent utopia is offensively dull. The men who started the movie in power end it in power, literally raised on a stage above the masses. Julia’s character has been reduced to mother, Wow is dead. What “great debate” has happened here? No, trust the geniocrats, you idiots! Of all its many, many, many sins, perhaps the sneering tone of pseudo-intellectualism that underscores Megalopolis is its worst.
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Perhaps all of this is giving Megalopolis, which is largely nonsensical, too much credit. Here are some real things that happen in the movie. There is archival footage of Hitler. A Soviet satellite crashes into New Rome and destroys people’s homes, but it’s good, actually. A character asks another character if they like his “boner,” only to reveal a crossbow that shoots and kills them. Adam Driver’s character can stop time. Wow Platinum can hypnotize people. A child shoots someone in the head. I could keep going.
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