Megalopolis sees Francis Ford Coppola go full Neil Breen

Spoiler room provides thoughts on and a place to discuss the plot points we can’t reveal in our book official review. Fair warning: this article contains plot details of Megapolis.

It’s a great time for Old Man Cinema. Legendary filmmakers lean on their late eras to reckon with their own complicity (Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the flower moon), their influential upbringing (Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans), their futile grip on the ever-moving time (Víctor Erice’s Close your eyes), their action-spectacle death drive (Tom Cruise’s constant stunt work) and their melancholic persistence (David Cronenberg’s The shrouds). Francis Ford Coppola Megapolis fits next to this self-reflexivity, but with a liberating, destructive side note. Funded entirely by his personal wealth, Coppola’s film doesn’t have to pretend to be something it isn’t, or be an answer to anyone. It doesn’t need a coherent plot, conclusive ideas, or even a selling point beyond “Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film.” It is one from the heart, and nowhere else. The captivating, immersive result is like a Z-grade vanity project from a top-notch filmmaker. In some ways Megapolis fits alongside Neil Breen’s seminal ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ piece of ego-sploitation from 2012 Fatal findings as a companion piece.

Megapolis is the story of New Rome’s Cesar Cataline (Adam Driver), an idealistic architect-playboy with a heart and mind (and ultimately a face) of gold, who attempts to build a utopia despite the corrupt, banal fools around him. He can literally stop time and has a monopoly on a vague super-material called Megalon, the latter of which helps him survive an assassination attempt and forms the basis of his sci-fi urban renewal project. He won the Nobel Prize before we know for sure what’s going on. At least Coppola doesn’t deign to play Cesar himself.

Breen, a real-life architect who has taken over the role of Tommy Wiseau, tends to portray himself in his self-financed fables as messianic mega-men railing against corruption. In Fatal findingshe plays the brave truth-teller Dylan, who also has supernatural powers and a magical stone that helps him survive an assassination attempt.

The heroes of these films also share a penchant for grandiose vagueness. “We need a big debate about the future!” Cesar shouts at the finale of Megapolis. During a Q&A before the screeningCoppola quoted this half-statement, an optimistic rallying cry that put faith in everything human ingenuity could probably come up with if everyone would just talk it out. It is a sentence spoken with the same meaning, specificity and intonation as a speech in the epic, bloody conclusion of Fatal findings: “You now have all the truths, the real truth. Act now! On yourself! Outside of the corporate systems and these incompetent politicians. Act now. It is our only hope for the future.”



Fatal findings gives that sermon a diegetic applause. Megapolis just insinuates that this would be the correct answer. The path forward is left up to the viewing audience, as long as they listen carefully to their superiors.

But apart from the superhuman protagonists of Übermensch, their wives who could not hang on and committed suicide, the alien substances, the stiff performances and the didactic lectures (the Megapolis scene in which a live performer stands at the front of the theater with a microphone and asks Cesar a question is an inventive excuse for Cesar to preach directly to the audience), the link between these films is one of personal esotericism, freed from obligation from outside .

That intimate, sincere, inscrutable individuality makes these films endearing without barriers. You don’t feel like you could connect all their dots even if you had spent as much time thinking about them as the authors wanted them to arise. Breen and Coppola had the necessary funding to marry their idealistic but vague positions with soapbox directness. If money is no object, what do you create? The answer seems to be something that fits your image, using the skills and styles at your disposal. Breen’s films are crudely composed of stock photos and gratuitous sound effects. Coppola puts a kaleidoscope on his soul.

Megapolis Coppola’s mastery of form colors with signifiers of his time. A restlessly inventive visual style draws on various inspirations from film history. Coppola is clearly bored with classicism and jazzes things up with triptych split-screens, garish CG symbolism and Méliès-esque theatricality. Sometimes it is shockingly beautiful. Others are just hard to watch. Just like Coppola’s previous film Tweetsome of Megapolis is so disarmingly flat that it resembles the amateurish green screen so often deployed by Breen. Around these eclectic stylistic swings, Coppola weaves his rollicking tale (obsessed with the Roman Empire and moving sidewalks) from half-remembered tangents and his personal values. Coppola’s villains are gold diggers, family warriors, corrupt officials, Trump surrogates, sex tape deepfakers and moral hypocrites. His heroes quote the classics, praise beauty, love children and spread platitudes. The jokes are approachable and the emotions are romantic. When the credits roll, it feels like Coppola just let you finish over a long dinner. It’s a dizzying experience, sometimes disjointed and not always enjoyable, but valuable nonetheless.

So-bad-it’s-good films reach that “good” threshold not just through sheer incompetence, but because they reveal something human in their incompetence. That something can be unpleasant, or silly, or so foreign to what you expect that it is difficult to understand, but it shocks your system instead of succumbing to it. It is the reason that purity and sincerity are required; moviegoers can sniff out the calculations from a mile away. Although both are frustrating and absurd, Megapolis And Fatal findings are primarily pure and sincere expressions of artists who make art for its own sake. So many films are a stingy stretch of the imagination, merely hiding their cynical templates in whatever IP is lying around, trying to capitalize on their built-in audience and widespread demographics. Megapolis And Fatal findings are voracious hedonists, focused on pleasing just one person each. Being financially independent, recklessly self-sufficient, and thematically obsessive, these films may not be dramatically compelling or philosophically substantive. But they are hypnotic, raw expressions of a unique perspective.