Everything they have said about Megalopolis is not entirely true—it is even worse

I remember when, in 2019, I went to see Cats at the cinema. Although I’m not the biggest fan of musicals, I was very curious, and both its cast and its director (Tom Hooper, the man behind Les Misérables) suggested it could be a great movie. However, the experience couldn’t have been more catastrophic. The movie was a collection of nightmarish images that today, we would say, looked like they were made with AI. The plot made no sense and had no emotion. And the musical numbers made you want to go deaf.

Well, that is nothing compared to the experience I had watching Megalopolis at the San Sebastián Film Festival. The latest film by Francis Ford Coppola, none other than the director of The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Dracula, has been enduring severe criticism since its premiere at the Cannes Festival, with comments as harsh as “Narratively and thematically, Megalopolis is a disaster” or “one of the most incoherent films I have ever seen in my life.” In fact, the marketing team tried to disguise this with a trailer, claiming that his previous blockbusters also received bad reviews.

But it’s not just that they were right, but the movie is much more grotesque than you could ever imagine.

It is an exhausting movie to watch

Could spend hours and hours saying why Megalopolis doesn’t work, but the truth is that it can be summarized much more easily: it’s a movie in which no element works. The story doesn’t make sense (literally) and is so outdated that it feels like a script from the seventies; the actors seem lost in a world they don’t understand; the photography and visual effects are, at best, ugly; and although there seems to be a thesis behind it all, it is not recognized in any sense.

Megalopolis could perfectly be a film by Zack Snyder. That is to say, a bland collection of images that try to be attractive but fall short. A story that is not worth telling and that also doesn’t know exactly what it wants to say. And yes, it is evident that there are small traces of the great Coppola behind all this madness. But nothing could compensate for the fact that this film even exists.

I am a person who loves when movies take risks, but sometimes great geniuses need someone to set limits for them. In fact, that is sometimes what Megalopolis is about. But it is also what Coppola should have considered before spending his grandchildren’s money on a feature film that not only will not transcend but also tarnishes an otherwise almost impeccable career.