Francis Ford Coppola
Megalopolis

Rarely have I found a film so useless and disappointing, yet so structured, complex, and vast. Dreamed of for decades, funded with the director's own money (at least 120 million), discussed in the media, stirred here and there. It must be said clearly, this "Megalopolis" is a glaring bluff, a gigantic and enormously expensive construction that conceals an alarming void of ideas inside. It will probably represent the inglorious end of a filmmaker who had already collected several flops.

A series of parallels, metaphors, symbols, citations (even in Latin) scattered like spices on meat, by the handful, perhaps thinking that quantity would make up for the lack of quality and coherence. A series of two-dimensional characters that aspire to be the parody of an already decaying world, but reduce themselves to enacting the usual, trite stories we've seen a thousand times. A series of names and references to Latinity which have no purpose, except to captivate the viewer for the first five minutes. There are statues of gods, the circus with games and chariots, tunics, and laurel twigs on heads. But they are useless.

A crazy, chaotic, almost random editing, it seems (especially in the second part). One continuously jumps from one thing to another, the characters argue and make peace every five minutes. A critique of the decadence of customs that seems to be written by a middle-school teenager: the mayor who wants to build a casino, the architect who wants a citizen-friendly neighborhood, the scantily clad girls on car roofs, the billionaire hitting on the host on TV.

A series of inexplicable and unexplained ideas: the protagonist who can stop time (but does nothing in the meantime), a CCCP satellite (?), which crashes, devastating half the city. The most serious problem, however, lies at the heart of the narrative: what innovative proposition does this brilliant architect have for us? Meh! I honestly didn't get it, aside from a glittering material with which to build houses and roads that look like mushrooms. Is this really Coppola's utopian dream?

He doesn't even seem convinced of the merit of the idea, and indeed stuffs the work with trivial subplots and ramblings of an old has-been criticizing capitalism and today's corrupt morals. The singer who gets paid to remain a virgin, the old billionaire who marries the young girl, the social-climbing she-wolf, the populist and corrupt nephew, the conservative mayor, his rebellious but kind-hearted daughter. This is the tenor of the side stories: they might entertain for a while, but none lead to even a remotely interesting outcome. Add to this a tasteless, chaotic, redundant style. In the end, one begs for mercy.

I repeat: all this hullabaloo only to arrive at conclusions like a sham of a mushroom-house neighborhood. I refuse.

The much-longed-for future in the film will certainly not be delivered by this over-eighty director, who fills his mouth with dreams but doesn’t even know what he wants and ultimately takes refuge in a series of clichés (love, the little neighborhood with gardens, the school). He doles out (easy) criticisms to the entire system, not realizing that with this drivel, he too is rightfully part of that decaying world he thinks he's combating.

"The elderly filmmaker who squanders millions on his last, excessively costly works of senile dementia."