Megapolis is an act of remarkable hubris: a self-financed cinematic plea for humanity to assert its least basic nature and surrender itself to the possibility of utopia. Francis Ford Coppola loves people but remains wary of the sloppy masses, which creates a fascinating tension at the core of the project, a concomitant rejection of populism and the desire to help a population longing for something bigger and better.

That bigger and better future can only be realized by Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), an architect who not only developed the magical building material Megalon, but also serves as an important bureaucrat in the world of New Rome, and has the ability to: oh , stop time. It’s not clear what the point of this time-bending ability is, mind you. But it looks pretty cool when he stops an implosion mid-explosion. And it helps him connect with Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter and the only other person who can see him bending time to his will.

Part

New Rome, a stand-in for New York City and America at large, is paralyzed. It’s dying a slow death, one of decadent stagnation: Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) has no vision beyond common vulgarity, and the wealthy elite happily indulge in this tasteless excess even as the masses suffer from a lack of housing , lack of jobs, lack of vision. Or something like that, anyway. It’s never really clear what the masses are suffering from, but often they stand on the fringes of the action and look vaguely sad. Cicero’s dreams are about concrete and steel and casinos, houses and jobs and economic growth, stability in the present at the expense of future excellence. Cesar dreams bigger and believes that without his hand at the helm and without the shape-shifting alloy of Megalon, all will be lost.

And yes, this is all a metaphor. (Or perhaps a fable, as the film’s subtitle states.) For American politics, for the film industry, for… everything, everything. We live in a rut of our own making, a rut that continues to recycle fashion, intellectual property, and musical influences because that’s what the people want. All we need is someone who sees everything, who comes along and gives them something better.

All we need is an artist with a vision.

Entr’acte

Megapolis is partly idealistic, a desperate plea to those who believe in the power of art to let the artists – the architects, the playwrights, the musicians and, yes, the filmmakers – lead humanity forward. That’s why I feel comfortable quoting lyrics, just for a moment, just to set the tone. This is from “The Pioneers”, from Bloc Party’s brilliant 2005 debut album, Silent alarm:

If it can be lost, then it can be won
If it can be touched, it can be turned
All you need is time
All you need is time
All you need is time
All you need is

We promised the world that we would tame it
What were we hoping for?

The wildness of the world, the desire to tame it through willpower (and projection of force), the belief that time enough is all it takes to achieve our goals, and the danger of what happens when you try and fail: listening to this on an iPod in a booth at the Weekly standarda few feet away from the closet that housed the Project for a New American Century, “The Pioneers” was a song that hit hard when I heard it in 2006 for… several reasons.

Last but not least, utopian ideals often lead to strong reactions.

Megapolis will fail commercially. At least at the box office, the most visible signal of commercial success and failure. This is less of a prediction than one fait accompli. Nothing so ambitious can succeed, because its success is based on convincing people to see something they’ve never experienced before, and if I tell them to see this, it won’t get anything in the face from their friend who says it looks like nonsense. The film will fail and the nine figures Coppola invested in the film will be lost over decades, one penny at a time, as the film finds an audience at home. Or not. Perhaps it will disappear into the ether, like other works of mad genius.

And the lesson that money men learn is that ambition is to be avoided, that idealism is weakness, that the masses want their money and are not interested in what cinema will support in the years to come. The trade magazines will roast the film and its director for their bold pandering. The gossipers will spew bile. The studio heads who rejected the film will be knowingly clucking their tongues. The roller coaster enthusiasts will gross at the box office – and will once again play the wronged victim despite endorsing the dominant cinematic mode of our time.

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All this was predictable; everyone who saw it Youth without youth or Tetro or Tweet probably understood what a $100 million Coppola movie, made without any form of adult supervision, might look like and how much appeal that would have to mainstream audiences. After the film’s final trailer dropped, I joked on Twitter that it was similar to Francis Ford Coppola’s Sucker puncha reference to the much hated Zack Snyder film that I have an unhealthy amount of admiration for. But that’s almost literally what this film is: Like Snyder, Coppola was given both a tool to visualize the world in any way he saw fit and the budget to realize that vision, and the result is practically experimental. Megapolis is ethereal and messy with limited attention to little things like ‘linear storytelling’ or ‘audience understanding’. It’s ultimately an interesting failure, and an interesting failure remains much more worthy of your attention than successful mediocrity. If Megapolis serves not as a moment of rebirth for cinema, but as something closer to the death knell, or at least it did with a line of killers chowing down on every scrap of solid dressing they could get their teeth on.

Honestly, I’m having a hard time choosing which of the mind-blowing performances I enjoyed the most. Driver has made something of his career delivering killer performances for aging authors: as a Sancho Panza replaces Terry Gilliam; as Enzo Ferrari for Michael Mann; and now as Cesar Catilina for Coppola’s decades-in-the-work dream project. Aubrey Plaza’s portrayal of Wow Platinum is strangely timely, as the character is a CNBC reporter who uses her smoldering sexuality to get the goods and marry rich. When she can’t land Catiline, she instead chooses his insanely rich Uncle Crassus, who Jon Voight plays for an hour with the kind of manic energy he brought to his 10 seconds of screen time as a chewing madman in that one episode of Seinfeld.

Crassus’ other cousin, Clodio, is played by Shia LaBeouf as a kind of cross-dressing doppelgänger of Donald Trump, stirring up the mob and indulging in populist rhetoric to do… something. The politics of this film are not particularly well thought out; Despite Clodio’s villainy, you could easily argue that it is a fairly simple fascist story about the needs of a brilliant leader to lead the dull masses and corrupt elite out of the mud they wallow in and into a better future, democracy is damned . I haven’t even mentioned Dustin Hoffman and Jason Schwartzman and Laurence Fishburne and Talia Shire and Kathryn Hunter, all of whom perform at about 110 percent of their required wattage.

Megapolis isn’t exactly a good movie – I think it fails on relatively fundamental levels, both as standard storytelling and light-hearted metaphor – but I’m glad it exists and glad to know that the thousands of dollars worth of Coppola Merlot I’ve spent over the course of I have consumed time. Years have contributed in a small way to the creation of this unwieldy monstrosity.