MEGALOPOLIS ★★★
(Unclassified), 138 minutes
When the director of the Godfather films, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, invests $180 million of his own money into a passion project, you have to take notice.
Adam Driver plays a visionary Nobel Prize winning architect Megalopolis.
But when Francis Ford Coppola’s output in the past 25 years is made up of the little-seen Youth Without Youth, Tetro, Twixt and Distant Vision, you’re right to be sceptical. Does the legendary American director, at the age of 85, have any more great films in him?
The answer turns out to be, well, maybe. But he didn’t have to put them all in this one.
Megalopolis, which had its Australian premiere at a sold-out IMAX screening at the Sydney Film Festival on Saturday night after respectful but largely unflattering reviews in Cannes last month, is a monumentally ambitious sci-fi drama. It centres on a Nobel Prize winning architect, Cesar (Adam Driver), who works to rebuild a version of New York called New Rome as a sustainable utopia, with opposition from a city official, Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito).
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Complicating matters is that Cesar falls for Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), a medical school drop-out who is the only New Rome resident who sees that he has the power to pause time.
As all those Roman references suggest Megalopolis is an allegory about the collapse of the United States as an empire, with references to social upheaval, financial inequality, Donald Trump’s hollow posturing, 9/11 and the storming of the Capitol.