Reviews For Francis Ford Coppola's MEGALOPOLIS Drop Call it "Bonkers", "Boring", and "The Craziest Thing"
Megalopolis recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and critics have been posting their reviews. The movie was said to have sparked a 7-minute standing ovation after the screening, but the reviews that have been coming out are split.
The movie currently has a score of 50% on Rotten Tomatoes. I’ve really curious about Francis Ford Coppola’s new film, and it;s something I just have to see and experience for myself.
Games Rader says of the film, “Almost so bad it’s good, Megalopolis has its moments - if you decide not to take it seriously.”
They add: “Megalopolis is intriguing and often diverting, its more outrageous moments inviting comparisons with cult classics like Showgirls.”
Vulture writes: "Megalopolis might be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy every single batshit second of it."
Variety says that "Megalopolis is anything but lazy, and while so many of the ideas don’t pan out as planned, this is the kind of late-career statement devotees wanted from the maverick, who never lost his faith in cinema."
The Guardian says in their review that the movie "is a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film, full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanity’s future.”
Vanity Fair writes that it's "the junkiest of junk-drawer movies, a slapped together hash of Coppola’s many disparate inspirations. What really tanks the movie, though, is its datedness."
Rolling Stone shared: "It is exactly the movie that Coppola set out to make – uncompromising, uniquely intellectual, unabashedly romantic, broadly satirical yet remarkably sincere about wanting not just brave new worlds but better ones."
THR says: "It's not likely to go down as one of the more incisive responses to our bitterly polarized political landscape. Nor does it ever quite settle on a uniform tone, frequently coming off as both earnest and silly. But it’s never bland"
Here are some of the social media posts talking about the film.
The film stars Adam Driver, and it tells an intriguing story of an architect dreaming of a utopian version of New York City in the near future and his battle with the conservative mayor, who has other ideas about the city.
Contained within the epic is a myriad of storylines and characters. “The fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems in this epic story of political ambition.”
Coppola described the film as “a love story. A woman is divided between loyalties to two men. But not only two men. Each man comes with a philosophical principle.
“One is her father who raised her, who taught her Latin on his lap and is devoted to a much more classical view of society, the Marcus Aurelius kind of view.
“The other one, who is the lover, is the enemy of the father but is dedicated to a much more progressive ‘Let’s leap into the future, let’s leap over all of this garbage that has contaminated humanity for 10,000 years. Let’s find what we really are, which are an enlightened, friendly, joyous species.’”
Coppola also talked about the film and his goal with it, saying: “My first goal always is to make a film with all my heart, so I began to realize it would be about love and loyalty in every aspect of human life.”
He explained: “Megalopolis echoed these sentiments, in which love was expressed in almost crystalline complexity, our planet in danger and our human family almost in an act of suicide, until becoming a very optimistic film that has faith in the human being to possess the genius to heal any problem put before us.”
The filmmaker added: “I believe in America. Our founders borrowed a constitution, Roman law, and senate for their revolutionary government without a king. American history could neither have taken place nor succeeded without classical learning to guide it.”
Coppola also previously said of the film: “So somewhere down the line, way after I'm gone, all I want is for them to discuss [Megalopolis] and, is the society we're living in the only one available to us? How can we make it better? Education, mental health?
“What the movie really is proposing is that utopia is not a place. It's how can we make everything better? Every year, come up with two, three or four ideas that make it better."
He went on to say: "I would be smiling in my grave if I thought something like that happened, because people talk about what movies really mean if you give them something.
“If you encouraged people to discuss marriage and education and health and justice and opportunities and freedom and all these wonderful things that human beings have conceived of. And ask the question, how can we make it even better? That would be great. Because I bet you they would make it better if they had that conversation."
The cast for the film also includes Shia LaBeouf, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Aubrey Plaza, Jason Schwartzman, Laurence Fishburne, Grace VanderWaal, Kathryn Hunter, James Remar, Talia Shire. Dustin Hoffman, Chloe Fineman (Saturday Night Live), Isabelle Kusman (Licorice Pizza), D.B. Sweeney (Fire in the Sky), Bailey Ives, and Giancarlo Esposito.
Driver previously talked about the film, saying: “The movie is wild. It’s so imaginative and big and epic, and it’s bold. It takes a risk, and I couldn’t be more excited by it.”
This is going to be an interesting movie-going experience.