Movies

Peter Suderman | 9.27.2024 10:39 AM

If nothing else, Megalopolis is a whole lot of movie. But not in a good way.

Francis Ford Coppola's long-gestating passion project—in development since the 1970s—is a movie of sprawling ambition: Megalopolis gestures at ideas and concepts ranging from cultural decay to public debt to architecture to zoning. It's a movie about the slow, sad death of a once-great republic. Yes, Coppola, the director of The Godfather, still believes in America. But he's not sure that America believes in itself, so he's made a movie that seems to want to take on the entire nature of art, society, and human existence, and, in the process, demand that humans reach for more.

Surely, it declares, there must be something better—something more beautiful and more inspiring, something more worthy of epochs of evolution and human struggle—than the way we live now?

If Megalopolis is any indication, the answer, sadly, is no.

The movie is ambitious, yes, but in a way that's so clumsy as to be comical. Characters speak in elliptical, pseudo-Shakespearean runes so absurdly self-serious they sound like dramatic readings of tweets. The movie's story is a thicket of opaque schemes and subplots that are nearly impossible to follow. There are striking images, but........

© Reason.com