With the post-General Election disaster Conservative party conference in full swing at the ICC and across Westside’s hotels and nightlife bars and restaurants, too – it’s almost as if the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s hedonistic, in-fighting film could not have been better timed.
Why, after 40 years in the making, it’s even showing in Westside’s best screen too – in IMAX at Cineworld Broad Street.
MEGALOPOLIS (15, 138 mins)
New York City has been reimagined as the City of New Rome, its future at the mercy two men who are at odds like oil and water.
Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) want to keep things as they are with partisanship and greed to the fore, but architect Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) wants to leap into utopia.
Torn between them is Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the socialite daughter of Mayor Cicero.
With Cesar looking ripe to play a younger version of Leonard Nimoy’s Spock in a Star Trek reboot and financier Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight) resembling a cross between Dame Judi Dench and the (Old) Birmingham Rep-trained Derek Jacobi of I, Claudius fame, there are wild distractions aplenty on top of the wrestling and virginity auction.
Verdict: +
Some reviews have suggested Megalopolis is the ‘worst film’ ever made, a rush to judgement when there is so much to chew on.
True, it’s not a good film, and is often terrible, but the worst ever? Nope. Plenty of other super-ambitious films don’t always fully live up to the promises of the talents involved, from Bonfire of the Vanities to Watchmen, Amsterdam, Cloud Atlas and many more there is always something to see them for.
As well as giving the world The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation and Rumble Fish, veteran writer-director Francis Ford Coppola has spent four decades and some 300 rewrites trying to get Megalopolis to the screen and only did so by selling his vinery to help to fund the £90 million production.
No wonder, to borrow a title from daughter Sofia Coppola’s best known film, that its haphazard, hedonistic, evils-of-power script feels ‘lost in translation’. Likewise, the actors (including Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Fishburne) seem to be all at sea.
Or, in Shia LaBeouf’s case, attempting a sex act while balanced precariously on furniture.
Now aged 85, it’s extraordinary that Coppola has even attempted something on this scale when he’s never been as prolific as Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen or Ridley Scot in their own later years.
And two other key things keep this listing ship from sinking fully. One is that IMAX makes the most of the sub-Christopher Nolan shoot with landmarks including the Chrysler Building positively glowing like never before.
The other is that the central idea still has merit. After all, where are the great civilisations of the real Roman Empire and the Greeks et al today. And, hey, even the Victorians in 21st century Britain?
Why are so many modern Birmingham buildings so bland compared with the turn-of-the-century terracotta genius of The Bulls Head, recently reopened as the Peg & Grill on Bishopsgate Street and less than 100 yards from Cineworld’s front door? What happened to our own style and collective bravery?
In that sense, and for better or worse as the established order of our own contemporary world shudders, Megalopolis feels like a film of its time.
Even if Francis Ford Coppola’s vision has been muddied by the gravitational pull of ever-changing events from Brexit and Covid to Ukraine, Israel and even Harrods, the 2024 release of Megalopolis proves his instincts, at least, were right all along. And there has to be merit in that.
● YOUR REVIEWER: Graham Young has been reviewing films for the media in Birmingham for the last 35 years, serving the Birmingham Mail, Birmingham Post, Sunday Mercury, BirminghamLive and BBC WM. He was the 1996 Regional Film Journalist of the Year, and runner-up 1997-99.
