Megalopolis
Year: 2024
Rating: R
Length: 138 minutes / 2.30 hours
As a lover of cinema, I immediately recognize Francis Ford Coppola’s name. He put out such great and timeless films as The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now! (1979)—iconic to this very day. Since I was too young to see any of his films in theaters, I jumped at the opportunity to go in blind to see Megalopolis (2024). Once I got out of the theater, I had to double-check. Turns out, he has made dozens of movies, but there are only a handful worth mentioning that are any good.
Megalopolis suffers from some of the same problems that I feel plagued movies like Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019) and Babylon (2022). These directors, like Quentin Tarantino and Damien Chazelle, have made such a name for themselves that they received a blank check to do the movie they wanted to do. These movies then end up being too long and meandering, as if the editors didn’t dare touch the work of a master filmmaker. Megalopolis is Coppola’s most self-indulgent film and proof that these great directors work best when there are guardrails to keep them in check.
I know it’s heresy to suggest that studio interference could make a movie better, but with these films, something might have been changed to at least make it less bad. Sure, parts of Megalopolis looked neat, and I appreciated the thinly veiled modern metaphor for the fall of the Roman Empire. But when so many parts of this film just felt like Coppola trying to show off how great a filmmaker he is, the whole thing really fell flat. If it is the “fable” it claims it is, why can’t I seem to recall any significant lessons from it? What was the whole point? The director’s indulgence.
Coppola’s entry into the hall of fame of self-indulgent directors, I give Megalopolis 1.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
