Megalopolis is a fascinating film. It is very much a passion project of writer/producer/director Francis Ford Coppola, a film industry legend for directing the 1970’s classics The Godfather, its sequel and Apocalypse Now. Having initially conceived the idea for the film in the 70’s, Coppola attempted to get production started in the studio system multiple times in the following decades, but was ultimately thwarted each time. Following the partial sale of his winery, Coppola self-financed the film - reportedly to the extent of $120m and recruited an incredible cast for a production that was experimental and allegedly dysfunctional, resulting in an extremely polarising film.

Megalopolis takes characters from Roman history and overlays their conflicts over modern American society in a city called New Rome - the setting for a power struggle between Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina and Giancarlo Esposito’s Mayor Franklyn Cicero. Cesar is the idealist leader of the Design Authority, an institution given unfettered power by the Federal Government to reshape the city as it sees fit.

Mayor Cicero however, sees the efforts of the Design Authority as an attack on his station, and seeks to undermine it at any possible opportunity. He despises Catilina personally, an attitude made all the more complicated when his daughter Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel) becomes involved with Catilina professionally and later romantically.

Megalopolis has many subplots that run concurrently with this central conflict and all aim to explore in some way the big ideas the film has regarding the nature of modern civilisation, society and politics. Though its ambition and scope make the film a muddied and confusing work to follow.

Shia LaBeouf’s Clodio is introduced as a wealthy socialite child of an incredibly rich family who transforms himself into a populist political figure; Aubrey Plaza plays a TV presenter and purveyor of gossip who later becomes a trophy wife of a billionaire with her own political designs. Dustin Hoffman was here too, doing something conniving probably.

These multitudes of ideas already could be seen as too much weight to bear for the film’s comprehensibility. However, on top of all of these, Catilina has become empowered with the ability to control time through his discovery of the remarkable building material Megalon.

Now we have a science fiction element on top of political allegory, historical adaptation, social commentary, the discordance between tradition and the future and philosophical musings on the nature of, and the ideal form of human civilisation. There is just too much going on in Megalopolis, so much so that it slows down the audience's perception of time, dragging out the film’s runtime far beyond its 138 minutes. To me, it felt at least four hours.

There is much to admire about Megalopolis, the main thing perhaps being that director Francis Ford Coppola decided to make the movie he wanted without being told no by someone holding the purse strings.

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Unfortunately, Megalopolis as a film would have benefitted by having some constraints placed on its scope and ambition. But then, we wouldn't have this ridiculous, glorious expensive mess of a film to be confused over for years to come, and Coppola wouldn't have made the film he had been dreaming about for the last 40 years.

★★