or: Tex told me I’m a film reviewer so I guess I am

by Deputy

I’d just gotten off the phone with Tex. It was 10:34 on a Friday Night in December, cold and wet outside, Not the ferocious sound and fury of a prairie thunderstorm in Summer but the slow, incessant oppressive downpour of mid-winter in a place that sees less snow each year but nobody will acknowledge why.

I did what I always do after given a new and unfamiliar task – I shrink from the responsibility I have been given for as long as my self-respect will let me. In this case, that’s about fifteen minutes. Tex has an idea. He’s been on me to write something for the new site, and he has just the thing. A movie in mind. A *review*. On a movie he himself declared he didn’t make it through. And now, dear reader, it is my dark task to sit here and bear it, for your collective bafflement or enjoyment, check whichever may apply.

All that’s got nothing to do with this movie, excepting maybe that it is more coherent a narrative than I found within the uncountable frames of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. It seemed like a prime opportunity, from the scraps of info that fell through the cracks in my wall of disinterest. A golden child of Hollywood, maybe tarnished a bit recently but still whole, who lavishly self-funded his dream project from forty years ago when he was considered a better director. And yet here I am, paused at 29 seconds into the film, the opening scene, and I can’t shake the feeling that this shot of Grand Central Station is from a Civilization III cutscene, not a $120 million dollar film. The film has the same yellow cast to it that Deus Ex: Human Revolution did. If the color correction of a news broadcast is a one, and a pure yellow screen were a ten, this is a solid six (I’d put the Mexico scenes of Sicario at a four for reference).

It’s not just the color, many of the shots have a slightly uncanny appearance to it, like the editor ran it through an AI upscaler that’s not really meant for this sort of work. I watched it in Standard definition but I checked and others have mentioned it so it is not an artifact of my screen.
Coppola is very insistent on this “fable” taking place in “New Rome”, which just happens to be so exactly like New York that they forgot to change the text on the flag of the New York Stock Exchange just six minutes in. By that point the phrase “New Rome” has been shown in the pre-title quote, the title card, on a newspaper, on both the patch of a policeman and the side of the next car in his convoy, and in a too long dolly-zoom toward the city seal on a pedestal, because Coppola or the editor, maybe both, don’t trust that you could pick it up from context clues. This is all intercut with gratuitous shots of the neo-Roman architecture which are a staple of American edifices of government and commerce.

Jesus Christ I’m six minutes in and already frustrated. I can do this.

This is a film about something. I’d say it’s about Utopia except that utopia actually gets built and it’s fine, actually. Perfect even, everybody loves it, no notes from the peanut gallery. so, is it about politics? Maybe, plenty of political maneuvering happens in the meandering lazy river that is the plot. It seems more than anything to be a kind of naive, almost childlike appeal to unity and peace, a nasally “can’t we all just get along?” in the middle of a fistfight.

The acting is dull, lifeless even for much of it. The dialogue is all stilted and wrong, like a cast’s first run through a script and they haven’t found the rhythm. There is no rhythm to be found. In fact, the dialogue is all written and delivered in an almost faux-Shakespearean manner that makes it even less intelligible, except for the parts where Adam Driver actually does just recite part of the “To be or not to be” speech from Hamlet (which has a much tighter and more poignant script despite being 500 years old).

In writing this, I am actually struck by how much of this film would have been better served by being a play. The stage allows for a much greater milking of the scenery by the actors, which fits the grandiose dialogue slightly better, and the stage direction would fit this film in which actors stiffly shuffle about in front of a green screen, on which will be placed various windows ME screen savers of a New York cityscape tinted the color of cat piss. Except in the rare moments it is actually the color of Banana Laffy Taffy of course.

Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Fishburn, Adam Driver, Shia LeBeouf, Aubrey Plaza. The cast is almost entirely big-name actors down to the bit parts, and I have to wonder if this was Francis Ford Coppola’s way of paying debts to these actors while getting a tax break. God knows why they would agree to this if not that or a personal favor to the man.

The yellow hue does nobody any favors, but especially not Adam Driver, who feels like he is being held against his will for the majority of the run time. He looks like his day job and hobby are both drinking to excess. The bags under his eyes have bags under their eyes. Add to that his reserved-to-the-point-of-mumbling line delivery and it adds a veneer of misery over the baffling plot. I watched the film with subtitles and God help you if you try without. even with headphones and the nominal line in front of me I had trouble following some of the dialogue.

The exception to this, of course, is the many ADR lines that are edited in with the subtlety of a baseball bat. The replaced lines are an octave lower and about twenty decibels louder than any of the native dialogue. It is jarring. Add to that a lot of copywritten pop songs from twenty years ago that are probably a smidge too loud in the mix on their own and you have this mushy and often incomprehensible mess. I am left wondering if after the celebrity paychecks, there was any money left for an editor.

Okay, so, back to the plot. I am told it is based on the Catilinarian Coup attempt in 63BC. That is funny because it bears almost no resemblance to that event of which I had a passing familiarity for autistic reasons, and read further upon after viewing this film. When you base a film on a historical event but change the time, location, events, characters, and those characters outcomes, you get Gangster Squad. When you do all that and also acid, you get Megalopolis.

It starts out with Adam Driver jumping off the empire state building, but he stops time as he does so and decides not to jump. Just testing himself I guess. A little suicidal ideation as a treat. Laurence Fishburne, who is the narrator but also wanders around the background of many scenes dressed like Steven Seagal, breaks in and that is the last thing that makes any sort of sense. I am going to try to do this faster than just describing each scene as it comes, but I’m not sure I can do it justice.

Adam Driver plays a widower named Cesar Catilina of the Crassus family. This is actually a really cool, subtle reference to the fact that Francis Ford Coppola doesn’t understand a single fucking thing about ancient Rome.

Cesar invented a glowing gold floating substance called “Megalon” while trying to save his poor, drowning wife from a suicide attempt. He is the only one with this power and has an ego big enough to think he can build a utopia with it. He is a visionary architect, and we know that because we are told it, explicitly, by maybe three or four characters in the first ten minutes. He is at odds with perpetually typecast villain Giancarlo Esposito as the Mayor of New Rome, Franklyn Cicero. Cicero is in league with the banks and the other elites of New Rome. Cicero unveils a new casino for the district recently bulldozed by Catalina in his capacity as lord developer on high or whatever, but Catalina upstages him by announcing at the same, televised…. thing, which takes place on the catwalks above a soundstage where I assume a better production was being filmed, that he is instead building his utopia there.

Around this time Tex stumbled in, sick as a dog and halfway to cruising altitude on cough syrup. He showed up just in time for a scene to happen where Cicero’s parade is stopped to make way for Catalina’s Citroen DS (fun fact, Megalopolis has been out since September and nobody has made an IMCDB page or IMFDB page for it, but I still found the make and model). this is because Catalina is wooing Cicero’s daughter who is drawn to his magnetic…alcoholism? He spends the wedding in the next scenes getting blackout drunk and fighting a biker.

She follows him as he is driven by the Steven “the Narrator” Fishburn, whose name is actually “Fundy”, through streets of collapsing statues of the Roman Pantheon with jiggle physics. Catalina’s cousin (they are all cousins with each other, I think? Also, there’s a subplot about how a main character’s daughters are incestuous lesbian lovers, it goes nowhere but is mentioned in dialogue more times than I care to recall) Clodio Pulcher, played by Shia LaBeouf in a ratty mullet, also follows in a 50 foot long super extended suburban limousine taking pictures, as he hates Catalina and desires control of his dad Crassus’s bank. Laurence “the Driver” Narrator sees this convoy following them in the deserted streets and takes a single turn kind of fast, which doesn’t track with the actor’s movements nor the background but who cares at this point, and decides he lost them.

Following along still? I wasn’t.

Anyway, She follows him to his bedroom I think, where he hallucinates his dead wife in their bed and gives her a flower, Cicero’s daughter finds that not creepy enough and decides to date him, so Catalina dumps Aubrey Plaza’s treacherous reporter character, who decides to marry Crassus after Crassus’s soon-to-be wife turns out not to be underage, turns out not to be a virgin, turns out to be a foreigner, and turns out to be a terrible singer. Also, Shia LeBeouf runs around this wedding ceremony dressed as one of the bridesmaids in really painful looking gold strappy high heels, scheming the entire time against Catalina. This is commented on during these scenes and dismissed, but never brought up afterward and apparently had no effect or reason within the plot.

After being arrested and released (oh yeah, he was arrested for allegedly having sex with the not underage not wife from earlier, but it was revealed to be the scheme Shia LeBeouf was scheming schemely (Editor’s note: I don’t think “schemely” is a word but I’m allowing it)), Catalina can’t do the time freeze thing anymore and spends some time sadly sitting on a white plastic girder about it. Cicero’s daughter, who’s name I just remembered is Julia, shows up and he can do the time thing for her so all is well.

The old, defunct, nuclear powered Soviet satellite “Carthage” (subtle) which was supposed to break up over the North Atlantic off Labrador actually lands in New Rome and conveniently carves out a crater for Catalina to build his utopia in, upon the bones of the families who lived in that part of lower Manhattan Island. everybody goes “oh, that’s weird, that it did that. Oh well” and it is never mentioned again. The scenes of the satellite debris falling is really dramatic, and shows stuff like the statue of liberty is reversed from our timeline to show again this is New Rome. they undermine this later when they use footage of the real statue with the torch firmly and concretely in the right hand not the left.
Julia and Catalina conceive a kid, Cicero goes to Catalina and begs him to leave Julia, offering a signed confession as proof he maliciously prosecuted Catalina for his wife’s death but he can admit it now because Dustin Hoffman got crushed by a falling pillar mostly offscreen (we get a blink and you miss it flashback to the seconds before).

Oh, yeah. Dustin Hoffman. His character is a fixer, his main plot point is that he buys the virginity of the secretly not underage not virgin wife at the marriage ceremony with Crassus earlier with a bid of 100 million dollars. I don’t think that paid out though because the lie was revealed immediately afterward. All of his lines just sound like things he mutters to himself, that the crew caught on a shotgun mic and decided were good enough.

Tex left at this point, having made it further into this film than he did the first time around, and finally surrendered to the two-front war that was fatigue and Pseudoephedrine cough syrup. I really wish he had hung in for longer though, because after this it got *really* weird.

Aubrey Plaza takes control of and freezes Catalina’s accounts, but not before he is shot by a twelve-year-old who had him sign an autograph first because I guess Coppola remembered that detail from John Lennon’s killing and thought it fit. Narrator “the Seagal” Fishburne, who was in the driver seat, calls for help as he calmly exits the vehicle, takes a step, and leans into the back seat. This is a really drastic change in vibes, I must say.

Using the magical gold wonder material, we’ve been told only Catalina can use, unknown doctors rebuild Catalina’s face with it but it’s all glowy on the left side where he was shot, which frightens Aubrey Plaza when he shows back up. After Catalina sorts the accounts thing out and leaves, Aubrey Plaza goes from ditzy reporter to dominatrix and decides to have a really awkward sex scene with her step-son Shia LeBeouf, while also talking him through he steps he needs to take to usurp his dad AND cutting his hair. He then takes over in the next scene. Crassus has an implied heart attack from trying to follow the plot to this point, but it turns out later he just faked it or something.

Catalina’s face is fine now because the effects budget was tight. There is no further fallout from him being shot and technically dying I think, and it is never mentioned again. I thought they were going for a Jesus allegory but no. As an aside, the CG in this looks like it was done by the same studio that did Spy Kids 2, but they cared more about the creative vision then. What isn’t obviously CG stands out because it doesn’t have the slightly out of focus Vaseline smear effect applied to it to try to hide how rough around the edges it all is.

There is a really extravagant feast for Saturnalia, which, I forgot to mention, this is a universe where Christianity never happened so it’s all Latin themed everything, but it’s just Christmas. Right down to the old, broken-down Elvis impersonator singing “America the Beautiful” while feebly waving a full-size American flag. The people are starving in the streets so they have a riot about it (led by Shia LeBeouf), but the cops put it down off screen while the mayor and Julia escape with Julia and Catalina’s kid on the secret express train to New Jersey.

At the same time, Catalina opens the gates to Megalopolis, the crater utopia, which looks distinctly fungal, and everybody is happy now. The film ends with Crassus killing Aubrey Plaza with a bow and arrow which he hid under blanket and claimed was an erection, then shooting Shia LeBeouf in the ass with it twice as he ran away before donating his entire wealth to the utopia. Shia LeBeouf’s henchmen track him down and string him up by his feet like Mussolini, but then throw food at him instead of beating him to death. Julia gets back with Catalina and Cicero now believes in the utopia, which I think is the only character arc in the entire fucking movie. It then ends with Julia and Catalina trying to do the time freeze, but the baby is the only one who isn’t frozen.

Watching this film once, with an eye to write something on it, must be like trying to keep up while you transcribe the ramblings of Harry Dubois during talk therapy. It’s what I imagine you might get if you slowly spun the dial on an FM radio and then tried to make a movie of the words you caught. Just incoherent, disconnected noise. Full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. It was like a Latin themed mad lib where you only write in plot points from other, better movies. At one point a CG rose flew away from a bouquet and it looked like a red mouse crawling across the screen. I had to make sure Tex saw that too because I thought I had begun seeing things, like every character in this film does.

Coppola filmed a wildly infuriating self-flagellating diatribe of a film that cannot get out of its own way even when it’s trying to actually say something. It does every single thing that film students in a 101 class are taught is verboten. It does not do these things with the grace you would need to make it a wink and a nod affair. This is what happens when nobody is left to tell an auteur director “NO” anymore, because they have become so famous or obnoxious they have driven off all but the sycophants and the studio doesn’t care because it wasn’t their money in the first place. This film is a deep pool of Lovecraftian madness and I have peered too long into its murky depths. There’s darkness there, and nothing more.

And having stood there, deep into that darkness peering, I must admit there’s a lot I have left out. a Far Cry 3 style “drugs mean weird colors” scene done entirely practically but filmed like the club scene in the first John Wick. A lot of quite nice compositions. A consistent decision to split the screen in thirds in an apparent throwback to an experimental French silent film. In fact, elements of experimental film from the thirties through the ninties abound. If only as a history lesson, there’s a lot to work with here. And I hope that, given five years hindsight, a little more money, and an editor willing to stand their ground, probably forty minutes could be cut from this film, maybe some unused plot points added back in to make the last twenty minutes more sensible, and that released as a director’s cut could be an interesting film.

If I learned anything from this film, it is this. Francis Ford Coppola believes subtlety is for cowards and context clues are for people that don’t embrace the maximalist way of film making. He considers himself to be outside either camp.

Tex told me I am the film critic, so here I am. and that, folks, is all I have for you tonight.