Megalopolis is very good, but it's not a good movie. Spoilers ahead, but honestly, that doesn't matter for this film.

If you're reading this, you should watch it.

So let's take a look at it in three ways:

1. The way it looks
2. What it refers to
3. What will refer to it

The way it looks - and it looks good

Firstly, this movie is full of insane visuals and insane shots. Insane scenes with insane angles, really great play with shot composition, with motion, with dope scene transitions (I'm thinking of the one of two faces into lights into a car headlights, or everything in the Crassus wedding) - all of it is kind of crazy and it all also works on some level. It does feel like someone's art project, but they're really good at this (Coppola clearly is very good at this) so it all kind of works.

The things you see on the screen are also literally amazing. The costumes are great (blends of suits + Roman Attire, modernised Roman Togas, absurd dresses for the high status women), the lighting is great (and dramatic), the actors look great.

I also thought the acting was great (other reviewers may not agree).

The one let down is the CGI. Honestly, the CGI was so bad. It's unclear why it was used the way it was, but there were definite moments where I thought "C'mon, you should've built a set for this". Then again, Coppolla spent $100m of his own money on this, and maybe it's easy to complain when you're not paying for it.

What it refers to - it's a lot

To give you a sense of how this film builds on earlier material, see this tweet:

The "go back to the club" line in MEGALOPOLIS becomes even better when you realise that the whole scene is a remix of the climax from George Bernard Shaw's PYGMALION pic.twitter.com/2JrOzoZywO

— desmostylian (@Desmostylian) October 5, 2024

Coppola has already been dropping stuff on Instagram like:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Francis Ford Coppola (@francisfordcoppola)

and

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Francis Ford Coppola (@francisfordcoppola)

I definitely did not catch anything more than 10% of the references. There's very obvious Hamlet, there's Sappho, there's tons of weird stuff in there.

The overall impression I got was that Francis Ford Coppola smashed 50 years of all the TV, movies, plays, literature, art, non-fiction books and whatever else he's absorbed into this film. It's unbelievably heavy with references to stuff.

I am very much looking forward to the eventual annotated version of this movie with all the references called out so I can go out and watch all the referenced material.

What will refer to it

So one of the ways to interpret the film is to assume that Coppola is aiming to do with this movie what certain types of fashion shows do for fashion. The comparison would be to outfits you might see on a runway that are completely impractical and cannot actually be worn by people on the street or even on stage, where the point of those outfits is to explore a concept, and to try to present something that will influence other creators.

In that light, I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of future filmmakers talk about how scenes in Megalopolies inspired their own content, or pointed them to earlier works that have just incredible stuff in terms of how to communicate ideas through the language of film.