It seems clear to practically everyone involved that MEGALOPOLIS will most likely be a flop at the box office. This doesn’t mean that Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project isn’t worth watching, because the film definitely is. There are grandios, hallucinatory film moments, and the film is bursting at the seams with ideas. But despite its 135 minute runtime, it feels too short rather than too long. A lot feels like a sketch, behind which discarded elements can only be surmised.

MEGALOPOLIS has more in common with post-dramatic discourse theater than classic film dramaturgy. The film is Coppola’s vision of the downfall (or the salvation) of the American empire, freely inspired by one of the biggest inner crises of the Roman Empire, the Catilina Conspiracy, in which popular general Catilina and senator Cicero faced off. During a financial crisis in Rome, the Senate had raised taxes on the plebs. Discontent was growing in the provinces, and Catilina rallied the discontented and assembled an army that planned to overthrow the Senate, but underestimated the power of the Senate.

Coppola adopts the name of the protagonist and Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) recites the beginning of one of the famous “speeches against Catilina.“ Adam Driver as Catilina is a weird genius who invented the miracle cure “Megalon“ which can basically do anything, also awaken the dead. He plans to create a city of the future with it: Megalopolis. This vision is somewhat reminiscent of the museum park that Richard Serra wanted to build opposite the Dresden Zwinger in the 1990s: wild, quasi-organic forms that are not in the least interested in function or people.

Catilina’s uncle Crassus is the richest man in the empire and is about to marry journalist/influencer Wow Platinum, with whom Catilina is also involved with. However, he is currently more interested in Julia, the daughter of his rival mayor Cicero. His wayward son Clodio also tries to play a role, presenting himself as a man of the people and spinning intrigue. Besides Catilina, the man with the vision, power is what the people are most interested in.

Coppola takes swipes at the connection between politics and pop culture. There is a scandal surrounding Vesta, pop idol and virginal Vestalin, who first sings her hit "Purity" on the ukulele for Cicero before Clodio pins a sex scandal on her and she becomes a fallen bad girl à la Britney Spears/Miley Cyrus. There are car races, wrestling shows, and pop concerts at the colosseum. Coppola seems to be on Catilina’s side, who is also a thug, but one with a point of view, a kind of aesthetic fascist, a sensitive Mussolini with issues. But Catilina is brutal towards the population: instead of visions emerging, things are blown up and driven away. Cicero is the degenerate conservative thug purporting "business as usual" who babbles about infrastructure and building casinos. Clodio and Wow Platinum are, above all, power-hungry, hedonistic scoundrels.

MEGALOPOLIS is less “a fable“, as Coppola subtitled his film, and more of a satirical vision of doom. The film doesn’t care whether it’ll come to a reconciliation or a massacre. It continues: bread and games, representative statues, representative buildings that, a few years later, will smell as foul as Renzo Piano's ornamental ponds at Potsdamer Platz.

MEGALOPOLIS is a head-spinning, half-mad film version of the world that wants to include everything: Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, art deco and expressionism, the gothic, and TikTok. This is definitely not Coppola’s best film, nor is it something that you can just look at and nod your head at with ease. Coppola’s film is all about big gestures, and seems to simultaneously despire them. Greater madness has rarely been seen in the cinema. MEGALOPOLIS is unbelievable as a phenomenon and symptom.

Tom Dorow (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy