How can one deny Coppola, this once maverick now a sweet grandpa, any whim when the man even sold his vineyard to explore the deepest depth of his cinematic obsessions? “Megalopolis”, a roiling audiovisual magma, is a testament that the question needs to be asked, and not rhetorically.

Since Apocalypse Now (1979) and until today, Coppola has returned repeatedly to this tale of man venturing into darkness and madness driven solely by ambition. He’s explored it so thoroughly that he has eventually come to embody it. In Megalopolis, he himself becomes a Conradian figure, reviving the myth of the filmmaker willing to self-destruct for the sake of a cherished project, driven by a sort of messianic masochism. Despite common sense and any calls for moderation, this precarious audiovisual colossus, indulging every craving (the film ends with a title card basically wishing us all the best), arrives as a relic of an over-the-top visionary dimension, pushing boundaries on account of the smallest desire. We can dismiss Coppola’s fantasy of power – reviving Roman references over New York’s current horizon – or we can admire its insights, inventiveness, and ambition to disregard everything, hoping Coppola’s rebellious spirit will inspire others.

Since the first Anglo-Saxon reviews of Coppola’s latest announced disaster, I was sure the film was beautiful. And it is – even though, in its sandy colours and CGI delirium, it evokes a neo-baroque beauty akin to “Abu Dhabi”. It’s hard to resist the charm of this classical monumentalism that dreams of stucco and marble columns while imagining a quantum future. When meteors light up the sky, shadows of frightened people dance on building facades in an extraordinary moment. Clouds racing across the sky, people roaming the streets: the film flows with phenomenal ease through reality and beyond, creating order from chaos and vice versa.

Megalopolis is like a video game on a cinema screen, in “cutscene” mode – where you pause it and watch strange beings moving through a synthetic liquid.

I had to think a bit about what Megalopolis is really about. Coppola’s narrative gimmicks seemed to dissolve once outside the theatre, leaving only the memory of sun-scorched images, like a fire apocalypse. Critics might analyse its outdated themes and high-art ambitions, yet its sublime form gives it some merit.

The story, about two men vying for supremacy over the city – Cesar (Adam Driver), a megalomaniac Nobel laureate scientist who discovered the indestructible building material “megalon”, and Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the current mayor – is an absurd yet ingenuous concoction. This unbridled fantasy put many people off; as a cinephile willing to embrace any whim, it only intrigued me. Too bad it doesn’t go far enough. This clash between an Elon Musk-like protagonist and his Donald Trump-like antagonist (since Coppola clearly favours the former) is a trap. Cesar overflows with poetic musings, as if also a motivational speaker; Cicero, meanwhile, is the quintessential villainous populist. And… fight.

Once we get past the cringe, the film takes on another tone. Viewed as a comedy, Megalopolis proves to be a very satisfying experience. The trouble is, Coppola’s attempts at the burlesque genre shine only in unintended humour. In his great cinematic adventures, the gap between his ambitions and the often bloated, tiresome results – a mishmash of squandered resources – is intriguing, yet also awkward. What began in Apocalypse Now as a fierce testament to the trauma of war veterans, a film born from a desperate need to accurately depict the atrocities committed in Vietnam, has only expanded in muddled, bombastic directions, with one unreal thread after another.

In 1982, Coppola released One from the Heart, a musical minimalist in intent but very lavish visually, about a couple separating for one night, each exploring new encounters, only to reunite in the end. I like to think of Megalopolis as a 2024 version of One from the Heart: Coppola may have aged and amassed more resources, but his approach remains the same, as does his artistic intelligence. Both films start ambitiously far up in the stratosphere before descending into the smoggy, noisy air of the great American metropolis: Coppola aspires to conquer the cosmos through cinema.

One can also notice a pattern in his female characters, the director-screenwriter’s big oversight: mere starlets assisting, or getting in the way of, some “great man” on a transcendental mission. Incidentally, the mystique of the artist, this person of superior standing, is one of the laziest ideas in Megalopolis, a film that, on a philosophical level, isn’t exactly brimming with fresh reflection. Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter who begins a relationship with his political rival, the brilliant Caesar, is a two-legged sexist cliché meant to highlight, by contrast, the (conceited, as befits any personality) greatness of the illustrious men around her. The same fate befell the recently departed Teri Garr in One from the Heart: her character’s joy of domestic liberation was met with punishment and guilt, the film ending with her returning home to her spouse with her tail between her legs after realising she “made a mistake”.

Not that I’m fond of short-sighted analyses of representation, but these caricatured characters open another perspective on the film: a simple fantasy fulfilled, shamelessly integrating meaningless references. Megalopolis is an ultra-expensive machine serving as a plaything, a gratuitous Coppola-esque gesture, yet one that has some merits. Julia, tasked (like “all women are”, the film might say) with bolstering masculinity in strong aphorisms, at one point, encapsulates Caesar’s nature: “Man of the future so obsessed by the past.” Caesar is clearly Coppola’s stand-in, his usual retro-futurism evident here too, just as it was in One from the Heart, where he blended low-quality video images with grandiose stage settings. In a review of the 80’s film, critic Serge Daney summed up Coppola’s art: “It captures the gap between what we no longer know how to do (as in the past) and what we don’t yet know how to do (as in the future).”

In 40 years, despite all technological advancements, Coppola hasn’t changed at all. How is that possible? The more avant-garde Megalopolis claims to be, the more nostalgic it feels, attached to the era of large-scale performances and eye-catching sets.

Is Coppola a bridge between what was and what is to come – between the zoetrope serving as the emblem of his production company (the memory of cinema) and the unknown of AI (the future of audiovisual)? Or is he rather a chasm that must be crossed? His efforts seem too far-fetched, childish and loud, yet consistently inconclusive, resembling nothing but failure after failure disguised as fireworks.

Megalopolis is a whirlwind of images and sounds that ultimately cancel each other out. It’s proof that today, one can make a behemoth film out of sheer passion – where the fate of the world, supposedly, is at stake – that ultimately points to nothing. In its fervour for formats and theatrics (from split screen to archival footage of the Reich), the film spirals into a vortex fueled by itself – the sign of an art on the brink, sensing a need for change but unsure where to begin.

Megalopolis comes out in Romanian cinemas on November 8.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.