The Futile Ambition of Megalopolis

Christopher Fase ‘26/Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

Spoilers Ahead

Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s strange science fiction epic, has more ambition than it can handle. It’s a passion project that Coppola has been trying to create for 40 years now, and after facing rejection from major studios, the production budget of $120 million came from Coppola himself, largely from the sale of a significant portion of his wine company. 

The film follows visionary scientist and architect Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) as he attempts to create the city of the future against the wishes of Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and his own family. Tensions rise as the mayor’s daughter, Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel) grows to see Catalina’s vision for the future and soon falls in love with him. In the wake of a satellite falling from the sky and destroying a large portion of the city, the different factions go to war between the creation of Catalina’s Megalopolis and the current world that only serves the interests of the wealthy.

The film has quickly developed a complicated reputation, with a number of controversies surrounding the film leading up to its release, including alleged harassment of extras on set, the deliberate casting of “canceled” actors to avoid becoming what Coppola described as a “woke Hollywood production”, and a trailer using AI-generated quotes misattributed to notable critics. At the film’s release, the controversy did not stop. Critics and audiences were divided on what to make of the bold but often incomprehensible film. A particular scene has gained notoriety online in which Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) is meant to break the fourth wall and speak to a live performer in the theater. This idea cannot practically be done in most viewings of the film, and in many instances is simply replaced by an off-screen Jason Schwartzman and an inexplicably smaller screen. Depending on the viewer, this moment can be seen as a bold and groundbreaking innovation or a shortsighted and pointless novelty, which serves as a good microcosm of the whole film.

The project is not without its charms, primarily in its performances. Adam Driver shines in the lead role, striking the right balance between indulging in the character’s theater kid-esque eccentricities and bringing enough pathos to the role to make Cesar Catalina a cohesive whole. Giancarlo Esposito plays a mayor who has trapped himself in a life of strict electoral business that the world has already moved beyond, not straying too far from the type of self-serious villain he’s been typecast as in recent years, but bringing layers of sadness and humor to that archetype that makes his whole presence much more interesting. Even Shia LaBeouf, a performer who is mostly the weakest link of the cast, got a singular laugh out of me, which I don’t think any other filmmaker could make happen. These performances, combined with some outstanding imagery and an extremely silly sense of humor, were enough to carry me through the film on first brush.

With these strengths in mind, I still find Megalopolis to be a failure, largely because it cannot live up to its own lofty thematic goals. The creation of the Megalopolis in the film is clearly analogous to the creation of the film itself, and more broadly to art in general. Cesar is depicted as a misunderstood artist, complete with theatrical gesturing, Shakespearean monologuing, and a vision for the future that no one else can truly understand. He has the power to freeze time, literalizing the power of a filmmaker to capture the world around them in distinct images, stopping or continuing it at their own whim.

The film sets up a dichotomy between Cesar’s focus on the future and the people around him trapped in their focus on the present moment. As Cesar himself says, “Don’t let the now destroy the forever.” Cesar struggles to live up to this principle himself. Much of his motivation for building his Megalopolis comes from his grief over his dead wife, and as the film goes on, his success in building this city comes from him allowing himself to become closer to Julia Cicero, allowing himself to fill the hole left by his wife’s absence and eventually build a future in the form of a child, something he tried to create with his old wife, but couldn’t. 

There is a large emphasis placed on the hedonism of the upper class as a social ill, with significant setpieces dedicated to showing their elaborate partying, drugs, and sex. Many of the film’s key antagonists are part of this lifestyle, and as such gleefully take part in this lifestyle, which in many cases is directly what puts them in conflict with Cesar, contrasted with his genuine love of his late wife, of his work, and of Julia. The film also targets those who don’t engage with said hedonism themselves, but do provide it for others. Mayor Cicero is introduced with the announcement of a new casino that he sees as the most he can give to his people, a clear analogue to the major blockbuster studios that dominate our film landscape today. Taken by itself, this is not a bad critique of the upper classes, and fits in with other anti-rich films of the past few years.

However, the film also contains a subplot about homelessness and the tearing down of low-income housing for the ultimate goal of building the city of the future. Shia LaBeouf’s Claudio manipulates a number of the victims of this into a mob for his own political campaign against Cesar. The film doesn’t pay much attention to homelessness itself beyond its role as one of many social ills in New Rome. In the end, as Cesar gives a speech decrying the need for a “great debate about the future”, the film depicts the homeless being inspired by his philosophy, abandoning Claudio’s campaign for what they now understand as the greater good.

In addition to its brief flirtations with these issues, the film also throws around political symbols in an equally incohesive manner, often shown so briefly that their use would read as pure shock value if used the same way by a different filmmaker. In one of Claudio’s political campaigns, we see people dressed up in red, white, and blue dresses and waving around the Betsy Ross American flag, and in the same scene, Claudio stands on a tree stump that is carved into the shape of a swastika. During the colosseum sequence, after doctored footage of Cesar sleeping with Vesta Sweetwater (Grace Vanderwaal) plays on the jumbotron, a fight breaks out, and someone pulls out a confederate flag. This moment is broadly meant to represent the failures of this society, but it’s not clear whether this person is for or against Cesar or what political ideology they’re meant to be a part of (although this could simply be a failure of editing). 

If there’s any key thing that unites these symbols and their use, it’s the element of societal regression, all being pieces of political movements from the past presented in contrast to Cesar’s vision for the future. This also applies to the general Ancient Roman aesthetics of the world, creating an anachronistic future that continues to reach into the past. All of these elements make up the “now” that Coppola wants to move beyond, but it’s difficult to understand them as a connected whole because they’re so disparate. The film seems to be saying that anything, no matter what it is, that puts the present day as a priority over the tomorrow is simply a distraction from building a better world.

Throughout the film, Cesar talks up the importance of conversation in and of itself. It is not detached from the material world that these conversations are naturally about, but it is seen as the beginning of change. However, the film doesn’t present a meaningful contribution to that conversation. It shows you a number of symbols and images charged with political meaning but actively avoids interrogating them. All of this is in service of a broader and vaguer message about how love is the thing that unites us and will bring this world forward. That message is nice, and Coppola presents it extremely genuinely, giving the film a nice heart-on-its-sleeve quality, but it can’t help but feel like a waste. In a moment when contemporaries of Coppola like Scorsese and Spielberg have recently made films so profoundly critical of both the film industry at large and of their own past works and legacies, Megalopolis can’t help but feel immature in comparison. It’s good that he thinks a dialogue is important, but I don’t see a productive one in which he also has a place.