MovieChat Forums > Megalopolis (2024) Discussion > Yes it was terrible

Yes it was terrible

posted 6 days ago by johnnybiscotti (453)
3 replies | jump to latest

I saw all the comments about how bad it is, and I thought I would give it a chance because sometimes I like movies that most people did not like. I also thought, I don't want to miss out on a shared experience of seeing a bad movie made by a master filmmaker especially because this was something he had wanted to make for decades.

It was painfully bad to sit through, it actually made me a little angry how bad it was. I wondered if the actors knew how terrible this was while they were making it.

Maybe if I were a Roman history buff and I could see how this was about the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC (as mentioned by another poster here) I would have enjoyed it.

Maybe this movie will mean more years later in retrospect. I just know that I did not enjoy the 2+ hours I spent viewing it yesterday. It felt very pretentious, maybe in 1977 (when Coppola first got the idea for this) it would have hit better as in those times the audience was more accepting of trippy experimental films. For me it was agonizing.

[–] Aylmer (499) 6 days ago

Yeah I totally agree. The crossing of modern day NYC with ancient Rome was a complete failure of a concept and just got irritating and distracting with all the ridiculous names. It felt both underbaked and heavy-handed at the same time. The movie was also false advertising as I expected us to be a future city through the duration but instead it felt awfully contemporary up until 5 minutes before the ending. Practically nothing gelled.

The one positive I can say is that it had a mostly great cast including a lot of yesteryear actors I hadn't seen in a while and was happy to see again like Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, etc. Oddly enough, the best performance in the film was Shia LeBeouf as... himself? He fit that irritating role like a glove, and usually I despise him as an actor. Aubrey Plaza was pretty good too; about the maximum amount of sexiness you can wring out of a 40+ year old actress.

Adam Driver? Who decided this guy can headline a film? They shoulda got someone with a little more offbeat charisma like Keanu Reeves or even James Franco if sticking with the canceled actors theme.

[–] Aylmer (499) 6 days ago

I also liked the concept of a believable 10-year-old hitman. It felt like that scene belonged in one of the GODFATHER movies, which it probably had originally been written for, but Coppola had "back-pocketed" for years.

Also it's kinda neat, in theory at least, to have gotten to see Coppola's most-likely last film in the theater. Unlike everything else he's done in the past 40 years, it didn't feel like the studio decided things for him. It was his actual uncorrupted vision, as bad as it was. It's like having some pure fertilizer, as opposed to fertilizer that's 70% sawdust.

[–] Aylmer (499) 6 days ago

What Coppola proved with this movie, along with George Lucas with the Star Wars prequels, is that studio interference can't be blamed for why a master-filmmaker's vision comes out crappy. Sometimes being surrounded by other business/creative types and having to negotiate committee opinions results in better movies... rather than just a central decider picking and choosing everything with no push-back?