Self-reflexive or self-indulgent?
Like many Anglophone readers of my generation, I suppose, I first came across ‘megalopolis’ in one of the many Judge Dredd comics published in 2000 AD magazine during the 1980s. The word was used to describe Dredd’s beat, ‘Mega-City One’, a gargantuan city covering the Eastern Seaboard of North America from Miami to Quebec City. I assumed both ‘megalopolis’ and ‘mega-city’ were science fiction inventions, but the Oxford English Dictionary taught me otherwise. ‘Megalopolis’ was used as far back as 1828, as a synonym for ‘metropolis’, and is now more commonly used to describe the contiguous built-up area formed when metropolises expand into one another (beginning with Los Angeles in the 1960s). ‘Megacity’ came much later, in 1967, and identifies a metropolis with more than 5 million residents (beginning with the Dallas-Fort Worth conurbation). In case anyone is interested, the biggest megacity in the world is currently Tokyo, with a population of approximately 39 million, and the biggest megacity in the US, New York, with 19 million. The setting of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is ‘New Rome’, an alternative, future New York, and the title also alludes to megalon, a material or mineral with magical properties that can regenerate and restore both cities and the people that live in them. When the narrative opens, protagonist Cesar Catalina (played by Adam Driver) has recently been awarded a Nobel Prize for his creation of megalon.
I first heard about Megalopolis long before it was released in September 2024 – not because of any especially effective marketing strategy, but because of the conditions of its conception and production. Coppola began thinking about it in the late 1970s and began work on it in the early 1980s. The original idea seems to have been something like a cinematic Ulysses (1922), James Joyce’s monumental reimagining of Homer’s Odyssey in 1904 Dublin (which is, in my opinion, the greatest novel ever published and ever likely to be published). Joyce’s source material was the most celebrated story ever told in the Western canon (or the second most celebrated, if you prefer the Iliad, which most scholars don’t), but Coppola’s was a curious choice. He had already tried something similar with Apocalypse Now (1979), a magnificent reimagining of Joseph Conrad’s brilliant novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), in South-East Asia during the Vietnam War. Megalopolis would, in contrast to both Apocalypse Now and Ulysses, reimagine a historical event, the Catilinarian conspiracy in the Roman Republic of 63 BCE, in a faintly futuristic New York. The conspiracy was an attempted coup d’état by Catilina, aimed at seizing power from consuls Cicero and Hybrida, and never passed into popular culture. (Though I consider myself an amateur historian, I had to look it up). Perhaps more problematic, where the monstrous complexity of Ulysses is to at least some extent clarified by knowledge of the Odyssey, knowledge of the historical conspiracy actually complicates the film: the fictional Catalina is called ‘Cesar’, but (Julius) Caesar (who is absent from the film) played a historical part; the attempted insurrection is by Clodio Pulcher (played by Shia LaBoeuf) whereas Clodius Pulcher opposed the coup; Hybrida and Cato have no fictional counterparts and there are several major characters without historical counterparts. Notwithstanding, Megalopolis is a reimagining, of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), one of the first feature length science fiction films and one of the greatest films ever screened.
By the turn of the century, Coppola had decided he would fund his ‘passion’ (or perhaps ‘vanity’) project himself and began shooting cityscapes of New York. At the turn of the next decade, he started writing the script. Eight years later, on the day before his 80th birthday, he announced that he’d finished the script, raised $120 million for a budget, and was ready to start interviewing actors. Filming began in 2022 and rumours of Coppola’s erratic behaviour soon spread, followed by allegations that he was under the influence of cannabis for lengthy periods, had sexually assaulted extras, and exceeded the budget by $16 million. It’s difficult to know how much of this to take seriously, but when I read about it, the whole enterprise reminded me of Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), a documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unsuccessful attempt to film Frank Herbert’s novel, Dune (1965), in the 1970s. Jodorowsky’s venture was hubristic to the point of insanity, ethically dubious, and doomed to failure, although the documentary acquired both critical acclaim and a cult following. Immediately after watching Megalopolis, I discovered that Coppola commissioned director Mike Figgis to make a documentary of the making of his film, which was released this month as Megadoc (2025). I wonder if Coppola’s motivation for the documentary was vanity or finances? Probably a bit of both.
Megalopolis begins with truly masterful exposition: we are shown almost everything we need to know about what will follow in the first 12 minutes (of 133 from opening to closing credits). One is simultaneously struck by the film’s idiosyncratic yet impressive style, a unique combination of filmed theatre, tasteful CGI, breathtaking cinematography, and beautiful mise-en-scène. Very quickly, we learn that Catalina has a utopian vision for New Rome at odds with Mayor Franklyn Cicero (played by Giancarlo Esposito) and the ability to stop time, which works on everyone except for Cicero’s wayward daughter, Julia (played by Nathalie Emmanuel). The plot is briskly set in motion when Catalina’s ambitious girlfriend, television presenter Wow Platinum (played by Aubrey Plaza), realises he is still in love with his dead wife and seduces his aged uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (played by Jon Voight), the wealthiest man in New Rome. Meanwhile, Crassus’ son, Pulcher, a spoiled wastrel jealous of the success of everyone around him, is desperate to make a name for himself. The ingredients are all simmering in the pot and our appetites whetted for making a meal of what follows. Shortly over half an hour in, the stakes are established as the question of whether or not Catalina will succeed in realising his architectural and humanitarian dream and all of Cicero, Wow, Pulcher, and Catalina’s self-destructive guilt about his wife’s death framed as antagonists or obstacles. Later, Wow Crassus and Pulcher will emerge as the villains of the piece. Later still, they join forces and become an apparently unstoppable dystopian threat that raises the stakes and heightens the tension in an altogether satisfying way. So, what goes wrong?I noted that the reimagined history was confusing. The pseudo-Roman setting constitutes part of Coppola’s distinctive style, which is pleasing on both the eye and the ear, but otherwise pointless. The same is true of the very limited advanced technology that seems to have been responsible for the film being classed as science fiction. While megalon is the means by which Catalina intends to realise his vision, that means could just as easily have been an imagined but mundane mineral or a fictional but plausible construction method. Similarly, the sole purpose of Catalina’s ability to stop time as far as the plot is concerned is to show that there is a genuine connection between him and Julia once they fall in love. If I appear overly critical of the film’s retrofuturism, the categorisation as science fiction in particular brings with it certain expectations, for example that the film will to at least some extent be about advanced technology or about the psychological or political impact (or both) of that technology. Futuristic megalon is as incidental as Catalina’s superpower and, like the Roman retrospection, serves a stylistic function, providing Coppola with the opportunity to present some (once again) aesthetically pleasing CGI. To remain with the plot a little longer, the story is very much that of Catalina’s ambition and the film a vehicle for Driver as Catalina. In that part, he either lacks the charisma or does not bring enough of it to this performance to engage and enthral the audience for the quantity and quality of his screen time. I found myself much more interested in Julia and Wow, watching the narrative as a tug of war between two powerful women with Catalina relegated to the role of the rope. As a final criticism of the plot, once all is lost for Catalina and Julia, the tables are turned by Crassus in a scene that is absolutely ridiculous. I think it’s meant to be amusing rather than dramatic, a deliberate parody of itself, but it’s neither tense nor funny and falls flat.
If Megalopolis is not about the Catilinarian conspiracy and/or its contemporary counterparts or the impact of advanced technology such as megalon, then what is it about? I mentioned Metropolis earlier and while there are several references to Lang’s masterpiece (and no doubt some that I missed), Megalopolis does not share its themes. Aside from a few superficial mentions of immigrants being unwelcome and some gratuitous police brutality, Coppola fails to offer a perspective on social justice and does not represent class conflict or even class consciousness. With politics, technology, and justice stripped away, there isn’t very much left. A theme that emerges with admirable speed in the expert exposition is some elaboration of the relationship between time and creation, the latter in the sense of artistic creativity. As the narrative progresses, a link is established with first utopian desire and then romantic love, all bound up within a temporal horizon. Early in the second half of the film, Catalina tells Julia, ‘I can’t create anything without you next to me’ and one is inevitably reminded of Coppola’s wife of six decades, Eleanor, to whom the film is dedicated and who died shortly before its release. The tyranny of time, the inspiration and perspiration of creation, dreams of a better way of life, loving as a way of living…Megalopolis is a film about itself, about the trials and tribulations of its own creation. Coppola has fictionalised his creative process from conception to production, creating an almost entirely self-reflexive epic. And while that doesn’t make it a poor film, it does mean that it doesn’t have very much to say to its audience, not much more than we could find in Megadoc anyway.
The critical response was initially described as ‘polarised’, but reviews have been largely negative, the only notable exception being Sight and Sound magazine, who placed Megalopolis 17th on their list of the best 50 films of 2024. To me, ‘polarised’ suggests something broad in scope and rich in depth, a work of boldness and ambition that will either flop or be recognised as a work of genius but could never be mediocre. I just don’t see this kind of greatness in it. There are plenty of highlights – Coppola’s style, the slick start, Emmanuel and Plaza’s performances – but more lowlights and Megalopolis is neither a magnum opus nor a nadir. The film has 45% on the Tomatometer, which is not unfair, though I do wonder if critics would have been more generous if they didn’t know that it was the product of 50 years of work. Unfortunately for Coppola, it was also a major commercial failure, only recouping £14.3 million at the box office and costing him $75.5 million by May 2025. At the time of writing, Coppola is 86, which suggests that this is his last film. While it’s a shame to see a career end this way, we should not forget that he is the genius who brought us all three Godfathers, Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders (1983), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), among many others. I hope he doesn’t forget either.**
