Megalopolis is a psychedelic film, in both the colloquial sense and the etymological sense of "mind-manifesting." It has no main argument, no total system of thought, and all of the attempts I've seen to describe or critique its "politics" have seemed to misunderstand it on a basic level. Its didactic monologues and literary citations wander back in intellectual history all the way to the origins of ethics and politics, repeating foundational ideas and playing with them in vague and sometimes contradictory ways. The past is stony language and the future is never-ending revelation, unfolding in a struggle that threatens all foundations.
So what does the future look like? Others have already pointed out that Catilina's "megalopolis" is basically just the "how society would look if..." meme, but yellow. His major architectural innovations, or at least the ones we see, are moving sidewalks, spherical cars on rails, and buildings that look like flowers. The movie is less concerned with the material specifics of Cesar's utopia than with the painful process of its realization: a strange political drama that seems to be happening far above the squalid conditions in which normal citizens of New Rome live, which we see only brief images of.
Catilina is in charge of something called the "Design Authority," which is presumably a branch of the municipal government but also seems to possess its own autonomy. Mayor Franklin Cicero, Julia's father, is a stubborn pragmatist who opposes Catilina's idealism. He's very unpopular for some unknown reason; he is booed whenever he appears in public, while Catilina is followed by paparazzi and questioned about his philosophy and personal life. This is weird, given that Cicero seems genuine in his belief that power should be used to address the everyday problems of the present, while Catilina utilizes his familial connection to the mega-wealthy banker Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight, in a truly insane performance) to dream a utopia that requires, in his view, sacrificing the "now," himself, everyone and everything else to the "forever."
Megalopolis self-consciously navigates timeliness and timelessness. The one point at which I think it legitimately gets in its own way is at the end of a long sequence set in the "Coliseum" (Madison Square Garden), when it veers into a brief subplot dealing with deepfakes and cancel culture. This and another digression near the end, which involves Shia Labeouf and conspicuous Nazi imagery, feel shoehorned in as signals of an awkward, but maybe obligatory, intention to make the film speak to our present. Like his protagonist, Coppola struggles to come up with anything vital to say about the now, instead limply indicating his disapproval. But my issue with the deepfake bit isn't that it's cringe — the whole film is epically, transcendentally cringe — it's just kind of boring and not funny, the only drag on a film that is otherwise consistently engaging and hilarious.
There's an understandable temptation to compare Megalopolis to other big-budget films with similarly uncanny postmodernist aesthetics, but to me its more interesting kinship is with the films of Neil Breen. In films like Fateful Findings and Pass Thru, Breen plays misunderstood geniuses and messiahs who wield supernatural powers in their struggle against the corrupt, short-sighted authorities of society. Breen has been praised and mocked for his lack of conventional inhibitions as a filmmaker. He takes wild creative liberties with narrative, editing, line delivery, and visual effects in order to convey an extremely urgent message, of profound importance for the future of humanity, that always seems to get partially lost or distorted on its way to us. Watching a Neil Breen film is sort of like a psychedelic experience: a series of strange images and language fragments that alternately provoke uncontrolled laughter and curious reflection. With Megalopolis, Coppola is working in that same register, but he's doing it with a hundred million dollars and forty years of rumination on the mainstream culture.
