Starring Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Shia LaBeouf, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman

Written and Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

American Zoetrope / Lionsgate – in cinemas now.

An upstart architect dreams of turning the Big Apple into a utopia, but the Mayor has other ideas for the city… or something.

Legend has it that on the set of the original Star Wars, a young Harrison Ford complained to director George Lucas: ‘You can type this shit, George, but you sure can’t say it! Move your mouth when you’re typing!’

Midway through Francis Ford Coppola’s humungous Folie à Un, Megalopolis, I mused that the hapless Adam Driver might have suggested to Francis that he get his old pal George to do a pass on the script. To be fair to Driver, if the Academy introduces an Oscar for Best-Actor-Valiantly-Trying-to-Make-Sense-of-Two-and-a-Half-Hours-of-Pretentious-Word-Salad, he would be a shoe-in for its first recipient.

Let me see if I can unscramble my neurons and paint a picture for you.

We’re in ‘New Rome’, a Gotham-like alternative New York. It’s all very decadent. We know it’s decadent because of the liberal application of the three ‘L’s of cinematic decadence. Leather, Lesbians and Licking. We also know it’s a bit futuristic because everyone has terrible haircuts.

Adam Driver plays Cesar Catilina, a Nobel prize-winning architect with an apartment at the top of the Chrysler building. He’s invented a super-material called Megalon (which is kind of like Nylon… only… Mega) with which he wants to redevelop the city as a sort of organic utopia. He also has the ability to stop time itself – ! – which is bound to come in useful… except it doesn’t, barely getting a mention until the closing moments of the movie 138 minutes later. On reflection, the ability to fast-forward might have been more useful.

There’s also a Soviet Space Station in a decaying orbit about to crash onto the city – ! – which is bound to have a major impact on the story… except that doesn’t either. Indeed its fall to Earth appears to be apropos of nothing really.

Enter Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia, the daughter of Giancarlo Esposito playing Mayor Cicero who is angry with Adam Driver about something or other. Jon Voight wanders in and out of the action as a banker called Crassus, occasionally accompanied by Dustin Hoffman (I had absolutely no idea who he was supposed to be). Voight is also Shia LaBeouf’s Dad, who has the worst haircut of all, and is some kind of Fascist pretender… although pretender to what I was never quite sure. We also get to see Shia’s pubic hair at one point, which I know is a spoiler, but I feel it’s only fair to warn you.

Anyway, Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel – keep up!) falls in love with Cesar (Driver) and there’s a dead wife and some handmaidens, although don’t hold me to that. There are reams of trite philosophical musings on the nature of civilisation, life, town planning and virginity, along with most of ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ from Hamlet, delivered from some scaffolding for no discernible reason. All of this is interspersed with quasi-psychedelic fantasy sequences.

Oh, did I mention that the whole thing is narrated by Laurance Fishburne, woefully underused as Driver’s driver, who must be wishing he could take both red and blue pills – anything to get him into a cinematic universe that makes more sense than this one.

I read that Coppola has been working on this project for over forty years, but much as I disapprove of using AI in screenwriting, he might have saved himself a lot of time by typing ‘Ted Talk’, ‘Psychedelic’ and ‘$120 million’ into ChatGBT and telling it that the script had to be 138 minutes long.

I always want to find something positive about a movie, but I’m genuinely struggling. Even the design is woeful – not punky enough for steampunk, not Gotham enough for Batman, not dystopian enough for Fritz Lang. The cinematography is unremarkable and the psychedelia is just plain naff and literalistic, like the League of Gentlemen’s Legs Akimbo with a multi-million dollar budget.

It’s often said that it’s easy to tear a movie apart but a million times harder to make one. Of course this is true, but calling out Megalopolis for the indulgent farrago that it is isn’t easy – it’s painful. Francis Ford Coppola is the extraordinary talent behind four or five of the twentieth century’s most iconic films. He’s a hero for any cineaste shaped by the American auteurs of the 1970s. Seeing him humiliate himself like this is a kind of tragedy.

Verdict: Worst of all, Megalopolis is just plain boring. If I hadn’t been reviewing it I would have left after half an hour. With apologies to the King James Bible: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down 138 minutes of his life for his editor.’ 1/10

Martin Jameson

http://www.ninjamarmoset.com