Coppola's Megalopolis is...a movie?
Long review short, I'd encourage people to watch it. I enjoyed it a lot. But I also love bat-to-face metaphors and occasional forays into the own-farts-sniffing-est depths of *ART* (cue wild splay of hands to the sky, dramatic thundercrack, background poster unrolling of a toilet labeled a pipe, etcetera). The actual story here isn't the feature, but rather Coppola's artistic screeding and philosophy-diatribe via bat-to-face metaphor. This IS a Atlas Shrugged movie--much as it takes an entirely different philosophical position about how we're all family and need to work for the future and [vague optimism]. It is not meant to be enjoyed, but Coppola ranting. And whether that's enjoyable is...dice-roll, at best, depending on one's capacity or present willingness to put up with artist opinion-opining and appreciation of how they try to do that via *ART* (once more, cue hands, thunder, toilet labeled pipe, etcetera)...
It is an artsy-fartsy movie. In fact, 'movie' is maybe a poor description. It has much more the feel of a stage-play. Some sort of bizarre, Coppola-ian Shakespeare homage combined with a (vague) rebuttal to Atlas Shrugged (at same or higher level of pretentiousness), all wrapped-up in Roman allegory that...*I* don't think there's much reason for it to be there beyond the kind of cliche allusions that have all been said about how the US is mimicking the fall of Rome....Maybe someone deeper into Roman history could, maybe, draw more out of those bits. Personally I just wasn't sure quite *why* they were there--they kind of get in the way of the Shakespeare and anti-AtlasShrugged-ian bits of the movie that make up the 'core' message. They're not bad and there's an extended bit at a modern-colliseum chariot-race/Vestal Virgin performance that uses them well, but the rest of the time...They're just kind of appendages that don't serve the story. Or, well, stories...
In another film, I'd maybe attribute it to too many cooks and design-by-committee leading to too much stuff thrown at the wall, but this is Coppola's self-funded dream thing he's worked on for decades, so we can be pretty well-assured that it's what he wanted. Yet a good bit of it feels last-minute?
Like...I am a sucker for really trite, obvious, metaphor. And Coppola uses that a BUNCH. The protagonist is seen a couple of times literally (but also, yknow, metaphorically) above the city, 'head in the clouds', looking out to the horizon. Meanwhile his opponent is at his desk, is speaking to union thug-y assholes and plotting plots, and at one point literally (but also, yknow, metaphorically) sinking into the ground/sand-of-time underneath the weight of city/responsibility/power...These I love. There's a lot of this metaphor-bat imagery that's deployed REALLY well. The story doesn't have much for them to hang off of because much of the conflict is so abstracted you don't care and the Romeo & Juliet story supposedly playing-out is dull at best...
Then there's a subplot that becomes main-plot point of a Trump allegory riling up mobs to gain power. A 'Make Rome Great Again' flag even features. Once again the metaphor is trite, obvious, and bat-to-face, but...It feels rushed, lazy, and doesn't DO much. Alongside the Rome allegory in general it just feels tacked-on, like a checklist box getting checked, something that needed refined in editing...But Coppola's been tinkering on this for decades?
Performance-wise...Adam Driver is fine. He's not as compelling as the story sets him up as, but...that could be intentional. His lady-friend is forgettable. Jon Voight and Shia Lebouf (as Trump analogue) are the real stand-outs and, I think, the ones who were fully onboard and playing-in to Coppola's...psycho stage-play nonsensium...vision. Both are caricatures come to life, and it's hammy and 'bad', but...I get the impression it's supposed to be.