I’m sure most of you have been following the circus act of Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus, Megalopolis (2024). In case you’ve missed the spectacle of this movie rollout, I’ll briefly catch you up. Acclaimed director of the Godfather series came up with the idea of a sci-fi-romance-drama-comedy-gangster-experimental film about the rise and fall of our modern-day empire in the 1980s. Cut to present day (nearly 40 years later), the film has finally come to fruition. Part of the slow-time process was due to: a) Coppola tirelessly trying to make his world seem believable, even going to the lengths of creating his own language and tech. b) Coppola was sentenced to “director jail” after the enormous and embarrassing failure of the Godfather III. c) Not a single soul wanted to put their money on this film, projecting its immense failure. Nonetheless, Lionsgate picked it up for distribution, the film entered its final cut and it’s in theaters now! Despite the honest and humble journey from idea to screen, we still need to ask ourselves: is this movie even worth the watch?
Megalopolis is honestly extremely hard to describe. From the second it starts, it feels like disjointed scenes spliced together for time. It’s pretty heavy on the reading right off the bat too, sometimes with a narration other times just with a title card. So while you’re trying to process the first five to ten minutes you’ve jumped into a very long scene with Adam Driver delivering a Shakespearan-like monologue. I honestly cannot tell you what a single point he was trying to make. Around this point in the movie (fifteen minutes in), I gave up on trying to make a comprehensive opinion about it and decided to just lean into the movie. This is the best and most pleasurable way I think anyone could watch this 2-hour and 18-minute film.
After giving up on making sense, I would say I actually enjoyed this film. It’s completely incomprehensible but Adam Driver plays a wonderfully charismatic anti-hero just by playing a role extremely reminiscent of his character on the cult-classic show, Girls. There are lots of random moments and, frankly, out-of-pocket line readings that kept me on the line and interested. For instance, at one point in the movie, Coppola insisted that there needs to be a live actor at every screening to ask Adam Driver a question that he has pre-recorded an answer to. This was strange but sparked joy in our theater as we praised our live actor! (The purpose of the live actor was completely ineffective, though, because no one could hear their one line since we yelled over it.) Be as it may, the film has lots of weird styles and interesting film techniques that are truly one-of-a-kind. It may be one-of-a-kind for its impracticality, but still, it's a rarity that will probably never ever touch the screen again.
All in all, I can’t join in on the Megalopolis hate train, because I had a great time watching it. And I think you will, too, if you go to a theater! A theater is the perfect place for this movie, so you can gauge the crowd and bond together over this immaculate trainwreck. With friends, this movie is funny and tolerable-- just like our little lives.