The year is 1977. Francis Ford Coppola is in the Philippines jungle, besieged by reports of ballooning budgets, on-set chaos, and unwieldy ambition as he toils to make his long-gestating passion project, Apocalypse Now.

The year is 1981. Coppola is shooting on the soundstages of Zoetrope Studios, besieged by reports of ballooning budgets, on-set chaos, and unwieldy ambition as he toils to make his long-gestating passion project, One from the Heart. 

The year is 2023. Coppola is at a production studio in Georgia, besieged by reports of ballooning budgets, on-set chaos, and unwieldy ambition as he toils to make his long-gestating passion project, Megalopolis. 

Has any living filmmaker been more willing to go for broke, more eager to sacrifice his sanity — and financial standing — for the sake of his art?

Megalopolis, the movie Coppola first conceived more than 40 years ago, is as much a tangle of contradictions as the man himself. It’s an overflowing fever dream of a fantasy, and an oft-incoherent jumble. It’s a utopian epic set in a near-future New York counterpart, and a historical “fable” that heavily, and clumsily, references the fall of the Roman Empire. 

It’s an ideas movie whose central ideas remain strangely opaque; a $120-million production, self-financed by Coppola himself, whose visual phantasmagorias, including a hallucinatory out-of-body sequence reminiscent of Vertigo, are often stunning and sometimes weirdly cheap-looking, reliant as they are on green-screen CGI.

Frustratingly, it’s a New York City movie that looks and feels like it was made by a guy who hasn’t lived in New York in approximately 2,000 years. (Coppola’s sci-fi recreation of New York is as rooted in artifice as One from the Heart’s glitzy soundstage simulation of Vegas.) 

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Plot summary seems futile here, but let’s give it a try. Set in an alternate New York called “New Rome,” Megalopolis centers around a visionary architect named Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), who is part Robert Moses, part Howard Roark, and also, with his anti-establishment defiance, an obvious stand-in for Coppola himself. Cesar can freeze and manipulate time using a magical substance called Megalon. He intends to use it to build a utopian city of the future called Megalopolis, which he spends his time envisioning and designing from his office atop the Chrysler building. 

The secondary characters, many of whom have Caesar haircuts and Rome-referencing names, are fuzzier. Cesar’s primary opposition is a corrupt and weird mayor named Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) who, despite Coppola’s best efforts, is not nearly as corrupt or weird as New York’s actual mayor Eric Adams.

Cesar falls for Mayor Cicero’s daughter, a conflicted socialite named Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who becomes a kind of apprentice to Cesar, and then his lover. She invigorates his spirit, but is also torn between her new lover and her father’s conservative ideology. 

Meanwhile, Aubrey Plaza, the only cast member who seems to grasp the film’s glitzy, gaudy tone, steals every scene she’s in as Wow Platinum, a TV reporter who ends an affair with Cesar to marry his slimy uncle, Hamilton Crassus III, a banker boss played by Jon Voight. An incomprehensible subplot involves a fascist demagogue played by Shia Labeouf (yes, that Shia Labeouf — Coppola said he deliberately cast “canceled” actors, sigh), who whips up a Trump-like fervor among the downtrodden masses, and who tries to sabotage Cesar’s public image by concocting a deepfake sex tape depicting him and a virginal pop star named Vesta Sweetwater getting it on.

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Many of the film’s most alluring — and most decadent — images unfold during a wedding reception for Platinum and Crassus, where Cesar enters a drug-fueled fugue state as Madison Square Garden transforms into a Coliseum, complete with gladiators and chariot races, because this is New Rome, goddammit. 

If that sounds batshit crazy, it is. Megalopolis steers away from the elegant naturalism of The Godfather in favor of 1930s futurism. Like several of Coppola’s lesser-celebrated films, particularly Rumble Fish, it reflects the director’s fondness for European art cinema, the surrealist movement, and German expressionist films of the ’20s. There are allusions to Metropolis (1927), riffs on Shakespeare, and shades of Caligula (1979). It’s a rich text, but also the rare Coppola film more stuffed with allusions to preexisting cinema than moments that future filmmakers will find themselves alluding to.

For every outlandishly fun moment in Megalopolis — this is a movie where Jon Voight mutters, “What do you make of this boner I got?” — there is a fog of self-importance stuffing up the cracks. It weighs down the voiceover narration from Laurence Fishburne, who resembles a History Channel narrator. It’s in the stilted dialogue and the mannered monologues from Driver, who we’re told has all the answers to New Rome’s decline, though those answers remain obtuse. The script feels stitched together and labored over, reflecting decades of false starts and discarded drafts. And the line deliveries too often summon community theater.

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And at the center of it all, a question: what is Coppola trying to tell us? That the right visionary genius can save our society and build the city of the future, if we only can trust him and give him the resources he needs? (A very Silicon Valley philosophy, to be sure.) That moving airport walkways will usher us into the future? 

We know that Coppola has strived to make this movie for decades, telling Film Comment in 1983 that he wanted to make “an epic about today that deals with the theme of utopia.” And we know that Coppola likes to make movies about idealistic men embarking on quixotic, high-risk quests and warring with the powerful — notably, Preston Tucker, the subject of Coppola’s 1988 auto biopic Tucker: The Man and His Dream. The filmmaker, with his impassioned vision and determination to transcend existing power structures in Hollywood, obviously identifies with such characters.

Like Tucker, and like Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now, Coppola is willing to risk everything for his obsessive pursuits. And yet I’m not sure he has ever identified with a protagonist as much as he identifies with Cesar. In a Q&A live-streamed to IMAX theaters around the country on September 23, Coppola passionately echoed Cesar’s idealistic rhetoric, saying that he wants everyone “to be in on the debate about the future.” 

The lingering problem with Megalopolis is its mystifying vagueness. Despite all the lofty dialogue and Marcus Aurelius quotes and high-falutin monologues about whether this society is “the only one that’s available to us,” it’s never entirely clear what defines Cesar’s vision for a utopian society, aside from some fancy-looking futuristic architecture and the use of Megalon to stop time, or something?

Even after the credits rolled, I remained confused about Cesar’s philosophy of progress and how it was going to help all those angry mobs seduced by evil Shia LaBeouf. Shouldn’t a movie that’s so earnestly and unapologetically about big ideas be a little less vague about what its big idea actually is? 

Maybe, several decades from now, Megalopolis will be embraced as a cult classic, its warnings and premonitions deemed too prescient for today’s audiences to grasp. More likely, it will sit beside One from the Heart and The Cotton Club as another admirably ambitious Coppola film whose turbulent production history overshadows the final product. 

Megalopolis (★★☆☆☆) is Rated R, and is playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.

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