Screw your courage to the sticking place if you plan on watching Megalopolis

With just the opening words "I believe in America" uttered against a black void, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather hits the ground running. Immediately, a tense atmosphere, the power of Don Corleone, and the story's relationship to America are established. Coppola's 1974 feature brilliantly begins with a lengthy wide shot chronicling various people just strolling around a park. It's a prolonged image reinforcing the subsequent narrative's emphasis on surveillance. It also solidifies The Conversation's restrained and expansive style of shooting. Coppola gripped the audience’s attention in these early works, strikingly preparing you for an idiosyncratic cinematic experience.

His latest work, Megalopolis, also prepares the audience for what’s to come but in far less successful terms. These initial scenes don't signify a compelling atmosphere unique to Megalopolis. Instead, these earliest moments indicate ineptitude and call to mind less-than-ideal pop culture comparisons. A shot lingering on gigantic text carved into Roman architecture that's inexplicably read aloud to the audience by Laurence Fishburne harkens back to screenwriter Blair Erickson's complaints about the opening voice-over narration in Uwe Boll's Alone in the Dark. A flurry of fast-moving clouds sprinting behind Adam Driver in a follow-up shot, meanwhile, seems to have escaped from a pre-2022 Epic Rap Battles of History video.

At least Megalopolis is honest about what it is from the start. These clumsy opening scenes preceding the title card make it clear a tedious boondoggle is unfurling. Viewers are not about to see an artistic successor to Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Apocalypse Now. Instead, Coppola delivers a Neil Breen movie directed by Doug Walker.

Megalopolis concerns wealthy architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), who has a grand vision for "New Rome", an alternate version of New York City in a realm known as the American Republic.. Using the new substance Megalon, Catilina plans to build Megalopolis, a utopian domain that only he could conjure up. Catilina is despised by other people in grand positions of power, namely Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), his cousin Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), and his jealous lover/TV personality Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza). Someone who begins to grow infatuated with Catilina, though, is Cicero's daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel).

She sees endless potential in this man with grand visions for the future and the power to stop time. As they grow closer and closer romantically, greater forces close in around Catilina to prevent him from realizing his Megalopolis dream. Also, Catilina's uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight) is around winning the heart of Wow Platinum while the protagonist’s driver, Fundi Romaine (Laurence Fishburne), provides constant narration for the proceedings.

Much has gone awry in Megalopolis. What’s especially peculiar in its ineptitude, though, is Coppola’s inability to commit to more experimental forms of storytelling. Since 1997’s The Rainmaker, this filmmaker has exclusively resided in the domain of experimental indie cinema. Titles like Twixt or Youth Without Youth are unabashedly un-mainstream productions eschewing standard narrative movie impulses. One would assume that Megalopolis would excitingly lean in the direction of Věra Chytilová or Dziga Vertov.

In that regard, though, Megalopolis is a listless affair. Coppola commits to a fully linear narrative structure with only fleeting digressions into surrealist imagery. A shocking commitment to upholding cinematic language standards permeates the movie. Catilina’s dead wife, for instance, appears framed in white lace clothing on a perfectly clean bed with golden light surrounding her. She looks like every dead wife in every 21st-century blockbuster. The height of sexual excess is simply women kissing each other in a club. Generic imagery of gigantic statues crumbling in sorrow seem lifted from a Stan Kelly political cartoon. A seething contempt for young women pop stars echoes other works from middle-aged and older men like Adam McKay's Don't Look Up. New Rome itself is a drab-looking uninvolving landscape calling to mind other more successful tableaus merging the past and present, like Gotham City from Batman: The Animated Series.

It's impossible to overstate how dismal Megalopolis looks. From an opening scene draped in a sickening yellow hue, unappealing and flat colors dominate the entire production. It doesn’t just fail in potentially functioning as experimental cinema. The proceedings are also dreadful visually as a standard narrative feature. Awkward framing is relentless under the direction of Coppola and cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr. Their style of shooting emphasizes imagery awkwardly emphasizing how rarely two big-name actors are physically in the same scene together. Gaze upon how characters are arranged in a given shot and you'll see only the busy schedules of actors rather than evocative imagery. Strange isolated shots abound in this movie while wider frames are shockingly absent. For a supposed epic, Megalopolis more often than not channels cheaply shot New York B-movies with its cramped camerawork. Cam McLauchlin and Glen Scantlebury's often clumsy editing heightens these problems. There’s just no rhythm between shots, with cuts occurring at such random intervals. It’s all so amateurish rather than excitingly unique.

Rather than conjuring up striking interpretative visuals, Megalopolis is enamored with flatly capturing characters exchanging excruciatingly verbose dialogue. “Don’t say your philosophy, embody it!” Julia once implores her father. It's a statement Coppola should've taken to heart! The ceaseless jabbering of these characters provides a great cinematic manifestation of some white dude cornering you at a party and forcing you to listen to his extended treatise on philosophy. Despite its supposedly grand thematic ambitions, Megalopolis features humans prone to saying very visible emotions or character motivations out loud. Sometimes it results in unintentionally amusing phrases that would make Tommy Wiseau proud, like Julia’s observation that “Ceasar would never say no to a child!”. Mostly, it’s just monotonous to experience.

Megalopolis provides viewers with stale imagery and utterly tortuous dialogue. As a cherry on top, Coppola’s script is also bizarrely undercooked politically. In an early scene, Cicero quotes Ronald Reagan’s “a shining city on a hill” phrase while shortly afterward Catilina chastises him for “selling the people things they can’t afford to emulate people they hate”. Here, the political divide between the characters appears to be conservatism vs. utopian leftism. However, Coppola refrains from wading into any “controversial” topics that would lend specificity to New Rome. We hear the world is in trouble, and that a new way forward is needed. However, this artist is too timid to explore any specific issues (capitalism, racism, environmental issues, etc.) that would lend specific texture to New Rome.

Worse, the characters are defined in such arch-moral terms (possibly a byproduct of Megalopolis being "A Fable") that it's never a politically challenging watch. Recent great movies like Killers of the Flower Moon and Aattam offered up not just harrowing social commentary, but also varied manifestations of systemic woes. Human beings who slaughter the Osage people or dehumanize sexual assault survivors aren't just cartoony villains. In these films, they also figure the audience may initially see as "the good guy". In demonstrating the complicity and outright evil in these characters, Moon and Aattam dare to make audiences squirm in considering how they too are complicit in societal problems. Megalopolis eschews such complexities in favor of broadly defined divisions between good and evil. It's all about as challenging to the viewer as it is dramatically engaging to watch. Once again, Megalopolis promises subversiveness and merely reinforces the status quo.

The greatest political concepts tossed forth in Megalopolis range from utterly confounding to unnerving. Largely non-white immigrant populations are relegated to being a vicious mob kowtowing to Trump stand-in Clodio Pulcher. Rich white men like Catilina and Crassus III are heroes society must turn to for answers. There's also a brief eyeroll-inducing plot thread about Catilina being falsely accused of sex crimes against teen pop star Vesta Sweetwater (Grace VanderWaal). In 1974, Coppola's The Conversation vividly reflected a sense of paranoia plaguing the working class in an era of American upheaval. 50 years later, Megalopolis reflects the gaze of exorbitantly wealthy white men. Now his greatest concerns are reinforcing the humanity of the bourgeoisie. No wonder this motion picture is so impenetrable and emotionally inert.

Megalopolis fails in so many conceivable ways, but it does provide one striking piece of unintentional entertainment. Truly great actors here deliver some of their all-time worst work. If you want to gaze upon the cinematic equivalent of a 90-year-old Freddie Mercury belting out Brad Paisley’s “Ticks” in a Denny’s parking lot, you’ve come to the right place. Dustin Hoffman appears to be reading off cue cards (badly) in his smattering of screen time. Jon Voight constantly appears to have just been jostled out of bed with his dazed performance. Poor Nathalie Emmanuel, whether it's through dismal direction or just the lines she's been handed, delivers some of 2024's absolutely worst line deliveries. There are such strange inflections in some of her deliveries that are never striking enough to become fascinatingly distinctive. They're just oddball flourishes struggling to lend personality to a vacantly written woman.

Adam Driver, meanwhile, cements here that he may have the Steve Carell issue of being incapable of being taken seriously (outside of Marriage Story) when he's yelling. His most pronounced shrieks or bellows, much like Carrel's loudest vocals, just sound too comedic to work as straightforward drama. Out of the cast, only Aubrey Plaza brings some fun energy to her unabashedly wicked TV presenter. A scene of her and Clodio Pulcher having sex while scheming up ways to gain power is unquestionably the highlight of Megalopolis (and not just because two people are finally firmly in the same scene together!). If only the rest of the movie was as interesting as that sequence or Plaza's performance instead of being utter torture to sit through.

Having said all that, it's worth noting Megalopolis has already garnered its share of fans. Esteemed folks like Vera Drew, Courtney Fairhurst Howard, and Drew Burnett Gregory has already expressed adoration for this ambitious feature. Much like I absolutely love critically divisive epics like Babylon, Southland Tales, and Cloud Atlas, Megalopolis might just be your new favorite movie in the waiting. Something this distinctly crafted is bound to inspire vivid responses from people. Unfortunately, for me, Coppola’s return to big narrative features just inspired groans and a constant yearning to bolt out of my IMAX screening. In terms of 2024 independent cinema challenging major studio filmmaking norms, the infinitely cheaper and more entertaining Hundreds of Beavers does circles around Megalopolis.