Is Coppola's divisive new film Megalopolis the next Apocalypse Now?

Today on Commotion, film critics Rad Simonpillai and Hoai-Tran Bui join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud from this year's Cannes Film Festival to react to Megalopolis, the latest movie from Francis Ford Coppola.

The film features a large ensemble cast, including Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, and Aubrey Plaza. It's billed as "a Roman Epic fable set in an imagined Modern America," and has become a standout of the festival — but perhaps not for entirely positive reasons.

Together, the panel discusses what Megalopolis adds to Coppola's storied canon, how it tries to challenge the filmmaking form altogether, and whether the general public might find it a satisfying watch.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, where the panel discusses Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and other highlights from Cannes 2024, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Megalopolis is a film that took 40 years for Coppola to finish. It's got a pretty wild backstory. Rad, why did it take so long to make this movie?

Rad: Well, because no studio would want to throw $120 million into something that is this daring, but messy, and just impenetrable. They couldn't make sense of it in the writing, let alone when they completed the project, so especially when today's algorithms want nothing to do with a movie like this, you're not going to get a studio to put that much money on it.

This is an idea he's been trying to make since Apocalypse Now— which, by the way, he did face similar struggles trying to make Apocalypse Now. The studios wouldn't back that either. So, there's been several attempts to get this going over the years … and finally he had to sell off part of his vineyard to finance this himself.

Elamin: You just use the words "daring," "messy" and "impenetrable," which— one of those is a compliment, the other two are like, "I don't know about this." You've seen the movie, Rad. Do you think, having seen it, that it is worth this whole headache?

Rad: I mean, it is for me. I don't know about the rest of the public…. I'm a fanboy for Coppola, and I want to see his messy vision. And that's what it is. This is a movie where in his mid-80s, Coppola is throwing everything he possibly wants to say at the screen. It's a movie where Adam Driver is playing the architect of a new city called New Rome, that's supposed to be similar to New York. It's a civilization about to collapse. He's tried to turn it into a utopia.

And within that, this is Coppola trying to throw every idea, every thought, every passion, every little thing he's fascinated with, whether it's classical art, whether it's evolution— it's like his tree of life. He's throwing everything at the screen. And I'm just kind of here for an old man wanting to wax philosophical about everything. Between all the messiness, audiences will be frustrated by this. I will not tell anyone you're going to come out of this movie satisfied. But I am here for the genius strokes in it.

Elamin: I'm interested in the parallels you just raised, Rad. Hoai-Tran, famously Coppola was like, "No one is going to like this movie," when Apocalypse Now was coming out, because it was messy and it was daring, and it was also impenetrable in many of the same ways. And then it took a bit of time for Apocalypse Now to be considered a classic. From where you're standing, do you look at this movie and go, "I think we're in the same kind of territory"? Or are you like, "Yikes, man, I don't know what we're doing here"?

Hoai-Tran: I don't think that Megalopolis will reach the same level of accepted classic as Apocalypse Now, just because it is that weird. It might be one of the most bewildering cinematic experiences I've ever had, and yet it was also the most rewarding. I'm honestly on the side of I liked it, and I found it more interesting and thought-provoking and also audacious, and in some ways kind of atrocious.

Elamin: "Audacious" and "atrocious," "daring" and "messy" and "impenetrable." You guys are like, "It's great, but it's bad. But it's great." That's what I'm hearing as you struggle through these ideas.

Hoai-Tran: It's incredible because what Rad was saying about it being all of Coppola's ideas stuffed into one movie is completely accurate. It feels like everything that he wasn't able to do — all these half-formed ideas, all these things that he's jotted into his notebook over his decades-long career — and he stuffed them all into one movie. It's so much movie, and yet I also hesitate to call it a movie at the same time because it does things that movies don't really do. It feels almost more like an art installation in some ways.

Megalopolis is trying to break the cinematic form and do something new with it, and I think that's bold, honestly. I think that's something that we kind of need as a shock to the system, in a time when blockbusters and our cinematic landscape is becoming so tedious and same-y. I think that not everyone is going to follow Coppola's lead and invest $120 million of their own money into a movie. But I hope that it in some ways inspires them to do something that is not traditional or conventional. 

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show, where the panel discuss Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and other highlights from Cannes 2024, on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Ty Callender.