Megalopolis is what you get when you mix Ayn Rand with Richard Kelly with <gulp> Neil Breen. A glorious “what were you even thinking” mash of ideas all twirled into a long tasty string of taffy that bends in the middle and falls to the floor. A grand vision that feels big but I suspect must have been bigger in Coppola’s fevered mind.

The film is set in the third millennium of the ongoing Roman Empire… specifically in New Rome (which looks a lot like New York). The city is crumbling and two opposing ideas of how to advance society are posed… one by the mayor Giancarlo Esposito and the other by Nobel Winning rich guy Adam Driver. Various other personalities bubble under the surface… somehow too many and not enough at the same time.

Megalopolis reminded me a LOT of Southland Tales by Richard Kelly. A film with a grand ambition to throw in the kitchen sink while telling the stories of multiple people doing multiple things… and a grand indifference toward minimalism, maximally tight-roping along a dozen wobbling strings stretching in six directions towards an unknown horizon (it’s big enough to contain that whole sentence). We get New Rome mixed with a falling Soviet satellite, a magical new building material, Vestal Virgins, Madison Square Gardens as Bread and Circuses, and who knows what else.

The movie has huge grand ambitions and Coppola spent a lot of his own money to get it made… but it felt like it wanted to be bigger. To have more characters, more politics, and more backstabbing. To go into more detail about the city and maybe the ongoing empire. But maybe nearly 2.5 hours was enough, maybe the money ran short, or who knows.

I’m not sure the cast does. There’s so much going on that maybe the cast was just along for the ride. Did they know what the ultimate theme was or were they as confounded as the audience? I mean, get a chance to work with Coppola on his Big Idea Movie and maybe you sign on and don’t ask too many questions.

Unfortunately, while I wasn’t bored, I don’t think the film achieved its intended apotheosis, its grand design, or its spiritual and social uplift. Only in the final minutes of hands-on-hips, gazing-into-the-future did I ever really feel what they were going for. Yet it wasn’t enough. I love the idea of forward-unto-the-future nobility… I just wish the film had felt like that more often.

I also never felt the crumbling city angle they were aiming for either. They told us New Rome was on the edge, but it never really felt like it. I give you the flailing Gotham from The Joker in comparison. Maybe they needed boots-on-the-ground characters to show us the cracks instead of hanging out in the ether with the rich and powerful? Or they could just tell us a bunch of times, instead? Ugh.

Also, it’d have been nice to know more about the ongoing Roman Empire… because it seems to include an actual United States complete with flag, a Ben Franklin on the money, and a Statue of Liberty (gifted by the French?). Clearly William Shakespeare was also a guy who lived in Londinium, presumably still under Roman occupation? But maybe the details weren’t important to Coppola. But the alt-history sci-fi nerd in me wanted more (like in Civil War).

There are also issues with Adam Driver’s magic new building material called megalon. I, for one, welcome out new plant overlords? And did no one ever tell Coppola that “megalon” was a monster Godzilla fought in the ’70s? And it does everything and anything including act as a medical application that lets you see through time? Maybe to suggest that glorious-unto-the-future thing that Adam Driver (and Henry Reardon if Atlas hadn’t Shrugged) had?

All sorts of “hey but wait? what? What was that all about?” moments that feel like they needed fleshed out in an even longer film. I’m sure Coppola has thought all this through… or at least I hope he did. Probably this is a film that will feel more cohesive as time passes. Or it will be forgotten. Who knows? Not me!

I’m wildly on the fence but I’ll go higher than my instinct suggests. I’m not sure I agree with my rating but I’m giving it the bump for the ambition (and for, if nothing else, not boring me). Its an imperfect, ambitious, misguided, grandiose chucking of the dice onto the table of cinema… and it makes me write sentences like that. Which is something.

Score: 77