2024 has been a spectacular year for box-office flops. The Marvels, Disney’s long-awaited follow-up to 2019’s smash hit Captain Marvel, failed to earn back its whopping $275 million budget; Joker: Folie a Deux, the jukebox musical sequel to a Taxi Driver rip-off made by the guy who directed the Hangover movies, failed to land with critics and audiences alike, leading to losses in the hundreds of millions; and Megalopolis, the long-stagnating passion project of Francis Ford Coppola, made just $13 million at the box office despite carrying a $136 million price tag. At least The Marvels was good. 

Maybe there were signs. Maybe Coppola starting production on the film a full forty-five years after he conceived of it because he had to fork over all the money himself was a sign. Maybe nearly every actor in Hollywood passing on the project before it was finally cast was a sign. Maybe choosing to cast actors who were “cancelled at one point or another,” including Shia LaBeouf (currently being sued for sexual battery, assault, and infliction of emotional distress by ex-girlfriend FKA twigs), Jon Voight (noted Republican and Trump supporter), and Dustin Hoffman (accused by seven women of sexual misconduct) was a sign. Maybe Coppola firing almost all of the visual effects team due to supposed creative differences was a sign. Maybe Coppola kissing topless female extras during filming two months before his wife died was a sign. Maybe Lionsgate only being willing to distribute the film if Coppola would pay $17 million of the marketing costs was a sign. Maybe the first trailer having to be pulled for using generative AI to fabricate negative reviews of Coppola’s previous films was a sign. Or maybe not. What do I know? Surely Coppola, the guy who made The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, couldn’t let us down! 

For a movie that has been in development since the seventies and rewritten a reported three times, the narrative is so bizarre and awkwardly structured that it reads more like the first effort from an eighteen-year-old fresh off his very first film class or the cocaine-fuelled rant of a supposed genius long past his prime. The film follows brilliant architect Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) as he attempts to build a city of the future, Megalopolis, with an amorphous shimmery blob he calls Megalon. Previously, his wife killed herself and he was prosecuted for her murder by now-mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Now, he’s falling in love with Cicero’s ambiguously bisexual and useless daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel). Earlier, he just dumped his fiendish mistress, TV presenter Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), who has now set her sights on Cesar’s wealthy and senile uncle, Hamilton Crassus (Jon Voight). Also, he’s feuding with his rat-tailed cousin, Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), who’s a fascist now. Before, he won a Nobel Prize. Currently, he’s an alcoholic. In unrelated news, he can stop time. All of this information is delivered in a steady stream of dialogue that believes itself deep and meaningful. I am saying something, Coppola seems to be screaming at his audience, I still have things to say! Unfortunately, his metaphors and allegories are so bogged down by his complete creative control that the only thing Megalopolis seems to be saying is that maybe there’s a reason Coppola peaked in 1979. Characters and plotlines are dropped at random, never to return (farewell, Grace Vanderwaal as a teen pop sensation who swears to remain a virgin, only to be deep-faked into a sex tape with Driver and subsequently rebranded as a Bad Girl pop star who is more akin to Jojo Siwa than any actual Bad Girl pop star, we hardly knew ye). Driver recites the entirety of Hamlet’s most notable soliloquy for no reason at all, Julia and Cicero exchange two lines in fluent Latin that do not reappear for the entire film, and often it feels as though there is a longer movie of dubious quality hidden within a shorter (though, with a runtime of 138 minutes, I am loath to call Megalopolis short), worse one. 

Clunky scripts can often be dragged along by good acting, and bad acting can occasionally be saved by the quality of a script. The same cannot be said for Megalopolis, whose performers range from the uninspired (Emmanuel, who has more chemistry with the idea of Driver than the man himself) to the baffling (Driver plays every scene straight, including ones in which he is combing the hair of the hallucinated corpse of his aforementioned dead wife or tripping on vaguely futuristic drugs for what feels like ten uninterrupted minutes) to the bombastic (Plaza, vamping her ass off even as the script demands she kiss Driver’s feet and mount LaBeouf’s face to snip his rat tail off while he calls her “Auntie Wow”). No one is acting like they’re in the same movie, which isn’t helped by the visually flat, often washed-out, and frankly ugly quality of the CGI and visual effects that regularly make the audience feel as if actors were all filming in separate rooms so that their scenes could be spliced together in post-production. It lends the film a strangely disjointed quality not helped by the fact that the timeline lurches forward in unwieldy bursts that leave Julia realizing her pregnancy in one scene and holding the fakest-looking baby doll since American Sniper in the next. 

I have not even begun to delve into the most insane parts of this movie. Clodio is in an incestuous relationship with all three of his sisters (named Clodia, Claudine, and Claudette.) A Soviet satellite crashes into Earth and destroys most of the city. Cesar is shot in the face and has his skull rebuilt with Megalon. Crassus, dressed in a Robin Hood costume, murders Wow by shooting her with a bow and arrow he had been disguising as his penis. There is an extended dead wife montage torn directly from many better movies made by worse directors. Everything is a metaphor and nothing is a metaphor, and in case you were wondering who the brilliant visionary here to save the future was truly meant to represent, Julia and Cesar’s eventual child, should it be a boy, will be named Francis.