The city of New Rome hosts the conflict between Cesar Catilina, a brilliant artist in favor of a utopian future, and the greedy mayor Franklyn Cicero. Between them is Julia Cicero, her loyalty divided between her father and her beloved.

Francis Ford Coppola’s long in development passion project ‘Megalopolis’ has finally arrived in cinemas, driven by at least $120m of the directors own funds, a problematic production process and rumours about the quality (or lack thereof) of the movie itself. We’ve been here before with Coppola of course, with ‘Apocalypse Now’ also going through the same journey, so there are reasons to be optimistic that a masterpiece may emerge from the chaos, but when Coppola hasn’t made a good movie in years, if not decades, hoping for lightning to strike twice is a long shot. And a long shot it proves, as ‘Megalopolis’ is frankly an absolutely bizarre mess that is the type of movie that can only be made and released with the determined backing of a director unwilling to listen to any advice or reason.

Describing the plot (of what there is) is likely to prove a fool’s errand but I shall try. Taking place in the city of New Rome (essentially New York but with characters named after folks from Roman times), it centres on two dynastic families who control power in the city. You have Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the potentially corrupt mayor who rules the city with an iron fist, and Crassus (Jon Voight), the wealthiest man in the city whose large family all want a piece of his power and money. Our viewpoint into this chaos is one of Crassus’s nephews, Cesar (Adam Driver), a celebrity architect (yes these exist in this world) with grand ambitions to build a new city called ‘Megalopolis’ using a new revolutionary building material called ‘Megalon’ that he has invented. The movie begins with Cesar winning the Nobel Prize for this invention, and this catches the attention of Mayor Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel, as wooden as ever), who ends up falling for him. Oh and he can randomly control time as well, because why the hell not?

There are various subplots thrown in, many of which centre around Shia LaBeouf’s Clodio Pulcher, who is a jealous cousin of Cesar, a pop star (Grace VanderWaal) and a TV presenter called Wow Platinum (yep that is a name that survived to the final cut), played by Aubrey Plaza, who has relationships with some of the primary characters. We also have a tragic backstory/mystery chucked in around Cesar’s wife, who mysteriously disappeared years earlier. Very little of this has much relevance to the main story (which in itself makes little sense), with the LaBeouf stuff the only element that retains any intrigue – largely, because he seems to be the one actor on the same wavelength as this stupid, stupid movie.

On one hand you have to admire the sheer chutzpah of Coppola to self-finance a movie on this scale and to make it exactly as he wanted, but unfortunately exactly as he wanted does not make for anything remotely approaching a good movie. ‘Megalopolis’ is absurd, pretentious yet shallow, with poor world building, a plot that is quite literally all over the place and some truly dreadful acting (often from good performers no less). Is it boring? Not really. There’s enough mentalness here that it was hard not to be entertained, but was it good or even coherent. Not a jot. I suspect ‘Megalopolis’ will be remembered in time, but largely in the same way the likes of ‘Heaven’s Gate’ or ‘Battlefield Earth’ are remembered, and not for the reasons the many classics Coppola made in the 70s are. Sometimes it really is time to retire.

Rating: 2/5

Directed By: Francis Ford Coppola

Starring: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D. B. Sweeney and Dustin Hoffman

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt10128846/