Megalopolis Review: Critics Call Francis Ford Coppola and Adam Driver’s Sci-Fi Film Bold but Megaboring!

Megalopolis, the long-awaited creation from director Francis Ford Coppola, emerges as a cinematic marvel, blending the visionary prowess of the legendary filmmaker with the touch of creativity. The sci-fi film paints a portrait of an idealist's quest to resurrect a utopian city from the ashes of catastrophe. The trailer teases viewers with glimpses of a world where statues come to life and chariots thunder through the streets of a metropolis reminiscent of New York City. Boasting a stellar ensemble cast including Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, and Aubrey Plaza, among others. Megalopolis Teaser Trailer: Adam Driver and Francis Ford Coppola Unveil Epic Fusion of Ancient Rome and Modern America in Sci-Fi Drama (Watch Video).

The film premiered at the prestigious 77th Cannes Film Festival. As critics weigh in on Coppola's latest masterpiece, anticipation mounts to hear their verdicts on this cinematic opus. Read critics' reviews here before you buy tickets.

Watch Megalopolis Trailer

Vulture: The moment when an actual live human walked out in front of the movie screen to pose Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina a question (which Cesar, in the film, proceeded to answer) might, in retrospect, be one of the less bizarre moments in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. The director’s supreme dream project, which he’s been trying to get off the ground for four decades, arrives at Cannes trailing clouds of speculation, skepticism, and controversy. It bears the marks of all the years Coppola has spent trying to make it, with elements that feel like they’ve been patched in from different periods in his filmography: a bit of The Godfather here, a bit of Tucker: the Man and His Dream there. But the movie also feels older than that. Watching it, you sense the imagination of someone who came of age in the 1950s, with its visions of scientific progress, innovative design, and space-age wonder. How odd and curiously apropos that when we do see glimpses of Coppola’s city of the future in this 2024 film, it doesn’t seem too far from something we might have seen on The Jetsons. Megalopolis comes to us as the (perhaps final) testament of an artist now in his 80s, but sometimes it feels like the fevered thoughts of a precocious child, driven and dazzled and maybe a little lost in all the possibilities of the world before him. Megalopolis Teaser: Adam Driver's Cesar Catilina Can Stop Time in Francis Ford Coppola’s Epic Sci-Fi Drama (Watch Video).

Guardian: The film’s heavily furnished art deco theatricality sometimes creates an interestingly self-aware spectacle, like an old-fashioned modern dress production of Shakespeare. And certainly a Coppola failure is a whole lot more interesting than the functional successes of lesser directors – the middleweights who aim low and just about hit the target’s bottom rim.But for me this is a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film, full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanity’s future. It’s simultaneously hyperactive and lifeless, lumbered with some terrible acting and uninteresting, inexpensive-looking VFX work which achieves neither the texture of analogue reality nor a fully radical, digital reinvention of existence. Yet this sci-fi conspiracy drama-thriller, avowedly inspired by the Catiline plotters of ancient Rome, does ask a valid question. The US empire, like the Roman empire, like any empire, can’t last for ever. Has America’s decline-and-fall moment arrived?

Variety: In the long-gestating, career-encompassing allegory that is “Megalopolis,” director Francis Ford Coppola puts his name above the title and, in the film’s lone act of modesty, the words “A Fable” beneath it. To call this garish, idea-bloated monstrosity a mere “fable” is to grossly undersell the project’s expansive insights into art, life and legacy. Here, backed by an estimated $120 million of the “Godfather” director’s own money, is the sort of big swing audiences and critics have come to adore him for: a recklessly ambitious, ginormous epic in which humanity’s eternal themes — greed, corruption, loyalty and power — threaten to suffocate a more intimate personal crisis. In this case, a conservative politician and a forward-thinking urban designer clash over a mythic city’s future.It’s Coppola’s fortune, and he can spend it as he likes, but grandiose title aside, it’s not at all clear why “Megalopolis” needed to be made at such a large scale. For the press screening before its Cannes Film Festival premiere, he insisted that it be seen on the town’s only Imax screen. And yet, so much of the film is shot in close-up, it would play just fine on iPhone screens (apart from the bizarre moment a man walks out, faces the screen and reads a few lines into a microphone). The cast is first-rate, pairing hot young stars like Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza with Coppola veterans Laurence Fishburne and Giancarlo Esposito, though their performances are oddly cartoonish.

Now that you've read the critics' reviews, do you think you'll watch Megalopolis when it hits theatres?

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 17, 2024 11:17 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).