Megalopolis or Megaflopolis?

Francis Ford Coppola poured his heart, soul, $120 million, and Jon Voight’s boner into Megalopolis, the resilient director’s latest megaopus. Now, critics have finally had the chance to visit Coppola’s garish vision on the occasion of the film’s Cannes Film Festival premiere on May 16. As early reviews hit the internet, we learned that critics can agree on one thing: Coppola has one wild imagination. That’s no surprise to anyone who has been following the 40-year-long making of the 138-minute passion project — the film was plagued by a controversy of “old-school” on-set behavior; early test screenings indicating just how batshit and unsalable it seems to be; and a lack of funding, which critics say manifests itself in questionable VFX choices, among other issues. While some believe the film to be bloated and boring, with its Petrarch quotes and fall of Rome allegory, others find the madness of Coppola’s futuristic fable thrilling thanks to the density of its oddities. Below, what critics who sat through a conversation about Voight’s (character’s) erection thought about Megalopolis.

“There is nothing in Megalopolis that feels like something out of a ‘normal’ movie. It has its own logic and cadence and vernacular. The characters speak in archaic phrases and words, mixing shards of Shakespeare, Ovid, and at one point straight-up Latin. Some characters speak in rhyme, others just in high-minded prose that feels like maybe it should be in verse. At one point, Adam Driver does the entire ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy from Hamlet. Why? I’m not exactly sure. But it sure sounds good.” —Bilge Ebiri, Vulture

“True to the advance gossip, Megalopolis is something of a mess; unruly, exaggerated and drawn to pretension like a moth to a flame. It is also, however, a pretty stunning achievement, the work of a master artist who has taken to Imax like Caravaggio to canvas. It is a true modern masterwork of the kind that outrages with its sheer audacity. In the early 20th century, the French shook their umbrellas at this kind of thing, and it will not get a soft landing in 2024, since it commands you to bend to its vision.” —Damon Wise, Deadline

“But for me this is a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring, and bafflingly shallow film, full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanity’s future. It’s simultaneously hyperactive and lifeless, lumbered with some terrible acting and uninteresting, inexpensive-looking VFX work which achieves neither the texture of analogue reality nor a fully radical, digital reinvention of existence. Yet this sci-fi conspiracy drama-thriller, avowedly inspired by the Catiline plotters of ancient Rome, does ask a valid question. The U.S. empire, like the Roman empire, like any empire, can’t last forever. Has America’s decline-and-fall moment arrived?” —Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“This is the kind of movie that will live on in midnight screenings. The phrase ‘destined to be a cult classic’ gets thrown around a lot these days and mostly inaccurately — something that is weird but popular and critically acclaimed does not a ‘cult classic’ make — and yet it seems to actually apply here. Megalopolis is stilted, earnest, over the top, CGI ridden, and utterly a mess. And yet you can picture a crowded theater shouting along with Jon Voight as he says in one key scene, ‘What do you make of this boner I got?’” —Esther Zuckerman, Daily Beast

“With Megalopolis, he crams 85 years’ worth of artistic reverence and romantic love into a clunky, garish, and transcendently sincere manifesto about the role of an artist at the end of an empire. It doesn’t just speak to Coppola’s philosophy, it embodies it to its bones. To quote one of the sharper non-sequiturs from a script that’s swimming in them: ‘When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free.’” —David Ehrlich, IndieWire

“So is it a distancing work of hubris, a gigantic folly, or a bold experiment, an imaginative bid to capture our chaotic contemporary reality, both political and social, via the kind of large-canvas, high-concept storytelling that’s seldom attempted anymore? The truth is it’s all those things.” —David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“Here, backed by an estimated $120 million of the Godfather director’s own money, is the sort of big swing audiences and critics have come to adore him for: a recklessly ambitious, ginormous epic in which humanity’s eternal themes — greed, corruption, loyalty and power — threaten to suffocate a more intimate personal crisis.” —Peter Debruge, Variety

“Megalopolis doesn’t exhibit that common curse of thinking it’s smarter than it is, but I’m also not sure that it’ll live up to even the most cursory of deeper examinations. There are audiences that will be giddy for its insanity, others angered by a seeming waste of pure directorial talent. But for the vast majority of the cinematic hoi polloi, there will be that most cursed of reactions: indifference. Megalopolis is not a film to be seen while doom-scrolling. A great deal of its joy will be to see it in a room, as I did, with the energy of an audience growing increasingly perturbed by what they were witnessing.” —Jason Gorber, AV Club