The city of New Rome is the main conflict between Cesar Catilina, a brilliant artist in favor of a utopian future, and the greedy mayor Franklyn Cicero. Between them is Julia Cicero, her loy... Read allThe city of New Rome is the main conflict between Cesar Catilina, a brilliant artist in favor of a utopian future, and the greedy mayor Franklyn Cicero. Between them is Julia Cicero, her loyalty divided between her father and her beloved.The city of New Rome is the main conflict between Cesar Catilina, a brilliant artist in favor of a utopian future, and the greedy mayor Franklyn Cicero. Between them is Julia Cicero, her loyalty divided between her father and her beloved.
- Awards
- 1 nomination
- Director
- Writer
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaFrancis Ford Coppola financed the entire $120 million film out of his own pocket. He had done the same with Apocalypse Now (1979) and One from the Heart (1981), and the failure of the latter made him declare bankruptcy. All his subsequent films up to The Rainmaker (1997) were made to pay off his debts.
- Quotes
Hamilton Crassus III: What do you think about my boner?
- SoundtracksMy Pledge
Written by Grace VanderWaal
Performed by Grace VanderWaal
Courtesy of Columbia Records
By arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment
Produced and Orchestrated by Kris Kukul
Featured review
Cinema is Something Alive and Ever-Changing
Winner of 5 Academy Awards and the man behind the legendary "Godfather" trilogy, Francis Ford Coppola, returns to cinema with a passion project that has been in the making for decades. After early screenings at festivals, some viewers described the film as a groundbreaking masterpiece, while many others called it an outright disaster and one of the worst films they had ever seen in a theater. All of this, of course, was enough to intrigue me to watch the film in IMAX on opening day. While the film is far from being bad, it's also hard to go to the other extreme and call it a masterpiece. Nonetheless, it offers a unique cinematic experience that feels somewhat like cinema from the future, and in my opinion, it's highly recommended to experience it on the big screen.
Coppola has dreamed of making "Megalopolis" for decades-since the 1980s, in fact. He began early production in the early 2000s and even managed to shoot some footage in New York, but the project was shelved after the 9/11 attacks, which made the film's themes and certain parts of the original script feel sensitive and in very poor taste for the time. In the years that followed, he struggled to secure funding for the project while maintaining his (ambitious, in his view) vision for it, and only in the 2020s, with renewed backing from studios and a significant amount of his own financial investment, was he able to revive the project. The new version of the script was aimed at an independent production on a massive scale, reflecting Coppola's ideas about society, politics, and art, while attempting to make boundary-breaking cinema-something that hadn't been done before.
A quick glance at the film's rating histogram on the Letterboxd site (as of now) shows that Coppola managed to create something truly exceptional with this project. I can't remember the last time I encountered such a distribution of ratings for a film, with nearly every possible rating receiving almost equal numbers of votes. It's a rare case of a film where its early viewers couldn't reach any consensus at all, with reactions ranging across the spectrum from colossal disaster to a one-time masterpiece-and everything in between. It feels like an ideal distribution for a film whose primary goal is to make viewers raise an eyebrow and think outside the box.
"The movies your grandchildren will make are not going to be like this formula happening now. We can't even imagine what it's going to be, and that's the wonderful thing about it. The notion that there's a set of rules to make a film - you have to have this, you have to have that - that's OK if you're making Coca-Cola because you want to know that you're going to be able to sell it without risk. But cinema is not Coca-Cola. Cinema is something alive and ever-changing." - Francis Ford Coppola
Personally, I'm a big fan of unconventional storytelling. Cinema has existed for decades, and following predefined patterns of how a movie "should" look and how a story "ought" to be written has been done in countless films. While this approach certainly works well in the context of many movies (after all, there's a reason it's become the norm), I feel it's long past being necessary, and any departure from this formula is intriguing and even most welcome. It seems Coppola came to the film with exactly this mindset, and the technical and visual aspects certainly delivered the goods, offering a one-of-a-kind cinematic experience. However, in terms of plot and screenplay, the film falls short, which left me somewhat disappointed.
Anyone looking for a coherent and well-written story has come to the wrong place. While the film's plot isn't bad, it plays a secondary role to technical aspects like visuals, editing, music, and so on-or in a broader sense, the experience of watching it. Personally, I felt a lack of world-building that would explain some of the elements presented in the film as if they were self-evident, and many times the story felt quite messy. Additionally, while the plot builds reasonably well in the first two acts of the film, it feels like the third act rushes to close the story in a way that seems a bit lacking and too hasty.
As criticized a lot regarding the movie, it deals with tons of themes and subjects, and it seems like Coppola had a strong statement to say in all of these subjects. While succeeding in some, the message again falls short in most of them and it feels like more polishing to the script, and even an additional running time would have helped tremendously.
The film boasts an impressive cast filled with great actors and big names, which seems unnecessary to go through one by one since, as an ensemble, they did an excellent job and matched their performances to the film's theatrical and fable-y style. In terms of direction, not much needs to be said-this is Francis Ford Coppola, after all, and you can clearly see the work of a professional here.
But if we focus on the "experience" aspect-the film does an amazing job, and just for that, I would highly recommend watching it, especially in an IMAX theater. The cinematography is among the most impressive I've seen this year, the editing is dynamic and excellent, the musical choices and their use are perfect, and overall, Coppola managed to make 140 minutes fly by with great enjoyment, delivering a unique and impressive cinematic display.
It's hard to ignore the negative buzz surrounding the film on social media, but in my personal opinion, it's worth seeing it and judging for yourself. It's definitely not a film for everyone, but as I mentioned, it offers a unique cinematic experience and is a very unusual movie-in the best possible way (in my personal view). Without a doubt, it's a film I can see myself going to watch again soon, as there's a lot to digest and analyze here, and because it was just so much fun.
Coppola has dreamed of making "Megalopolis" for decades-since the 1980s, in fact. He began early production in the early 2000s and even managed to shoot some footage in New York, but the project was shelved after the 9/11 attacks, which made the film's themes and certain parts of the original script feel sensitive and in very poor taste for the time. In the years that followed, he struggled to secure funding for the project while maintaining his (ambitious, in his view) vision for it, and only in the 2020s, with renewed backing from studios and a significant amount of his own financial investment, was he able to revive the project. The new version of the script was aimed at an independent production on a massive scale, reflecting Coppola's ideas about society, politics, and art, while attempting to make boundary-breaking cinema-something that hadn't been done before.
A quick glance at the film's rating histogram on the Letterboxd site (as of now) shows that Coppola managed to create something truly exceptional with this project. I can't remember the last time I encountered such a distribution of ratings for a film, with nearly every possible rating receiving almost equal numbers of votes. It's a rare case of a film where its early viewers couldn't reach any consensus at all, with reactions ranging across the spectrum from colossal disaster to a one-time masterpiece-and everything in between. It feels like an ideal distribution for a film whose primary goal is to make viewers raise an eyebrow and think outside the box.
"The movies your grandchildren will make are not going to be like this formula happening now. We can't even imagine what it's going to be, and that's the wonderful thing about it. The notion that there's a set of rules to make a film - you have to have this, you have to have that - that's OK if you're making Coca-Cola because you want to know that you're going to be able to sell it without risk. But cinema is not Coca-Cola. Cinema is something alive and ever-changing." - Francis Ford Coppola
Personally, I'm a big fan of unconventional storytelling. Cinema has existed for decades, and following predefined patterns of how a movie "should" look and how a story "ought" to be written has been done in countless films. While this approach certainly works well in the context of many movies (after all, there's a reason it's become the norm), I feel it's long past being necessary, and any departure from this formula is intriguing and even most welcome. It seems Coppola came to the film with exactly this mindset, and the technical and visual aspects certainly delivered the goods, offering a one-of-a-kind cinematic experience. However, in terms of plot and screenplay, the film falls short, which left me somewhat disappointed.
Anyone looking for a coherent and well-written story has come to the wrong place. While the film's plot isn't bad, it plays a secondary role to technical aspects like visuals, editing, music, and so on-or in a broader sense, the experience of watching it. Personally, I felt a lack of world-building that would explain some of the elements presented in the film as if they were self-evident, and many times the story felt quite messy. Additionally, while the plot builds reasonably well in the first two acts of the film, it feels like the third act rushes to close the story in a way that seems a bit lacking and too hasty.
As criticized a lot regarding the movie, it deals with tons of themes and subjects, and it seems like Coppola had a strong statement to say in all of these subjects. While succeeding in some, the message again falls short in most of them and it feels like more polishing to the script, and even an additional running time would have helped tremendously.
The film boasts an impressive cast filled with great actors and big names, which seems unnecessary to go through one by one since, as an ensemble, they did an excellent job and matched their performances to the film's theatrical and fable-y style. In terms of direction, not much needs to be said-this is Francis Ford Coppola, after all, and you can clearly see the work of a professional here.
But if we focus on the "experience" aspect-the film does an amazing job, and just for that, I would highly recommend watching it, especially in an IMAX theater. The cinematography is among the most impressive I've seen this year, the editing is dynamic and excellent, the musical choices and their use are perfect, and overall, Coppola managed to make 140 minutes fly by with great enjoyment, delivering a unique and impressive cinematic display.
It's hard to ignore the negative buzz surrounding the film on social media, but in my personal opinion, it's worth seeing it and judging for yourself. It's definitely not a film for everyone, but as I mentioned, it offers a unique cinematic experience and is a very unusual movie-in the best possible way (in my personal view). Without a doubt, it's a film I can see myself going to watch again soon, as there's a lot to digest and analyze here, and because it was just so much fun.
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- How long will Megalopolis be?Powered by Alexa
Details
Box office
- Budget
- $120,000,000 (estimated)
- Runtime2 hours 18 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 2.00 : 1
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