Sydney Film Festival Review - Megalopolis

 

“We are creating a new future.”

Messy, bizarre and beyond ambitious, Megalopolis is Francis Ford Coppola’s brazen passion project that he’s been toiling away at for decades, that’s grandiose in vision, but gobsmacking in execution, delivering an incoherent, overcooked, and outlandish spectacle that’s singularly strange and indescribably unintelligible.

Discussion Points:

This will be one of the most divisive and polarising films of the year, it’s like watching a car crash in slow motion that you can’t look away from, a $120 million budget film that somehow will earn valid comparisons to Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, and featuring a head-scratching fourth wall break involving an actual audience member asking questions to the screen. Francis Ford Coppola is either a mad genius or a complete fool - and I may be leaning towards the former. I can’t fault how exciting it is to see such creative and outlandish filmmaking on the big screen and Megalopolis is never uninteresting but it’s also an incoherent mess. Themes of time, history, legacy, civilization, technology, politics, the media & economics are all touched upon but never really explored, leaving this golden sun-baked, grandiose piece of filmmaking to feel incredibly shallow. I admired its scale & ambition but it just feels excessive and gaudy. The cast is a total mixed bag, feeling plucked from different films and blended together into one mismatched ensemble. It’s visually striking and dizzying in its digital sheen and golden tones. The costumes are gorgeous, the sets breathtaking, and the makeup and hairstyling is impressive, as all stunningly merge Ancient Roman aesthetics and contemporary fashion and architecture. And yet under all the creative veneer, the film has nothing to say. Can’t say I hated it because I appreciated its brazen bold ambition, but also can’t say I understood even half of the surreal inconceivable experience that I’m still trying to process. A truly WTF spectacle.