Megalopolis
Entry updated 29 December 2025. Tagged: Film.
Film (2024). American Zoetrope/Caesar Films. Written, co-produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Cast includes Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Lawrence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman, Shia LaBeouf, Audrey Plaza and Jon Voight. 138 minutes. Colour.
In an Alternate-History twenty-first century, America has developed along the lines of the Roman Republic, and the capital, New Rome, is run by a group of patrician families. The conservative and corrupt Mayor Cicero (Esposito) clashes with architect and Cesar Catalina (Driver) over the latter's plans to build Megalopolis, a Utopian City community to be constructed using Catalina's Invention, Megalon, a building material which has won him the Nobel Prize. Catalina has been in mourning since the disappearance and apparent Suicide of his wife, after which Cicero attempted to prosecute him for her murder. Catalina also mysteriously has the ability to stop time, unbeknown to anyone except Cicero's daughter, Julia (Emmanuel). Though initially hostile, she becomes impressed with his vision for Megalopolis, and discovers they can stop time together. They become lovers.
Catalina's benefactor, the immensely wealthy Crassus III (Voight) marries the much younger TV news reporter Wow Platinum (Plaza), who had been Catalina's mistress. At the wedding, a video is screened showing Catalina having Sex with an underage pop singer, prompting Cicero to an impassioned speech denouncing Catalina, who is seemingly ruined. However, Julia proves that the singer was in fact in her twenties. After a Soviet satellite crashes and destroys parts of New Rome, a rehabilitated Catalina begins building Megalopolis in its ruins. His jealous cousin Pulcher (LaBoeuf) contrasts this with the poverty of the populace and runs in oppositions as a populist demagogue, bordering on fascism. Cicero unsuccessfully attempts to bribe Catalina into giving up the Megalopolis project, objecting to its idealism and utopianism, by admitting he knew that Catalina had not murdered his wife but prosecuted anyway. When Pulcher has Catalina attacked, the doctors are able to save him using Megalon to reconstruct his skull.
Wow and Pulcher team up to take over Crassus's bank, but he realizes their duplicity and kills Wow and injures Pulcher, who escapes and tries to persuade his followers to destroy Megalopolis. Catalina makes an impassioned speech in support of the project, winning over the crowd and Cicero. Crassus gives him the backing to finish his utopian city. Julia has by now had Catalina's child. At New Year's Eve celebrations, she stops time, with only the baby unaffected.
Planned by Coppola since the 1970s, Megalopolis may be one of cinema's grand follies. After decades of failing to get the project off the ground, he financed it himself. By the time it was finally made, it was bizarrely (or heroically, depending on point of view) out of step with audience expectations around blockbuster films, not helped by stories of misconduct on set, and Coppola's refusal to engage in current distribution practices regarding streaming. Coppola himself entered the debate with a well-publicized tirade against contemporary commercial cinema, and the box office dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, against which a personal (if expensive) film such as Megalopolis was very much designed to stand. It was a box office disaster. Much of the film seems to belong to a different era, from its antiquated sexual politics (the women are either giggling airheads or sleep with powerful men to achieve success), the backward Technology in its hermetic world (everyone communicates by letter, and newspapers are the prime source of information) and its sincere belief in the power of individual art to overcome social discontent. At any time, however, a fairly direct translation of the real Catalinarian conspiracy of 63 BCE into a flagrantly artificial alternate history would seem a hard sell to audiences, even as its political points lose none of their relevance when measured against real-world developments.
Despite its narrative shortcomings, such as the strange underuse of the stopping-of-time motif, and the satellite crash coming and going with little mention, there is nevertheless a considerable amount to admire in Coppola's commitment to so personal a vision. Though the acting is frequently scenery-chewing, the sets are impressive, and the film achieves considerable grandeur despite its many flaws. [CWa]
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