Francis Ford Coppola – one of our most lauded living film-makers, creator of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now – returns to the screen after more than a decade with an ambitious sci-fi opus that has been 40 years in the making. Megalopolis is a tonally bizarre, futuristic exploration of hubris and power, layered with references to ancient Roman conspiracy and with a tendency for Shakespearean soliloquy, by way of HG Wells – but with an obvious anti-Maga sentiment that attempts to speak directly to The Way We Live Now . Essentially, it is a fable about a city’s powerful factions fighting for its soul.
But the result is an unholy mess with delusions of grandeur. The setting is New Rome in the near future, a sort of New York City fused with the Roman Empire, decadent and crumbling. Cesar Catalina ( Adam Driver , always compelling in pensive, brooding parts like this one) is a maverick genius, a controversial city figure and architect who has won the Nobel Prize for inventing a new, self-sustaining building substance known as Megalon, with which he hopes to build a utopia.
But he wants to raze parts of the city in order to build it, and has a murky history of possible violence, making him easy for his political enemies to attack. He is, in the fashion of many Coppola characters, an avatar for a misunderstood messianic artist with whom we can assume the film-maker identifies. His arch-rival is Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), seemingly representing an Obama-esque figure w.