Megalopolis Review

September 27, 2024 at 1:20pm
By Jason Stettner

This is the worst movie I’ve ever watched, it hits the Cats level of cinematic insanity. Not in the typical sense of it being straight bad due to budget since this did have quite the budget but that this film is just purely insane. There’s no logic to it, no flow and it’s just madness. I honestly can’t believe one would have wasted so many decades and so much money to make something that’s completely nonsensical.

It was just stupidity, and for whatever reason I sat through it in the theater. There were a few points where I felt like leaving but having brought someone along I was reading that they were maybe into, a fact I learned was inaccurate afterwards which is funny as I wanted to bail numerous times. So many boring moments or points to just check out and I sat through it…

It’s just a stupid movie. None of it makes sense, the resolutions are pointless and it’s completely inconsistent. You could write an essay trying to get a slight picture of what the message was but you’ll ultimately realize the creator didn’t even know what they were trying to convey with it. The story to an outside looker is ridiculous and describing what actually happened in the movie is even harder.

I could sit here and be pretentious about suggested deeper meanings but I’d have no proof from the film to back any of those concepts up. It wants to be grand, meaningful and deep. But the structure of the movie doesn’t support any of the bazillion concepts it’s throwing every way while twisting or turning wildly in differing directions throughout. Then it just ends and you’re like, what the hell did I just watch?

So let’s try to chat narrative. The city of New York which is like New Rome here is a backdrop to the conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) and Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). The former is apparently a brilliant artist but nothing shown really makes that clear other than some miracle material or whatever. That’s not really ever explained. Then the latter is the mayor of the city. They don’t like each other due to past events.

For whatever reason the mayor’s daughter Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel) is investigating Cesar while working for him and the two are in love I guess. To the side of that are large family dynamics. Shia LaBeouf plays some insane character named Clodio that is sort of just weird and there throughout the movie. Also a note about Wow Platinum played by Aubrey Plaza which ranges from insane to really bad in performance.

Anyways, lots of stuff happens and things explode and things need to be rebuilt and things go on and on and on and on. It’s just bizarre, the whole thing. Eventually it ends on a happy note which makes no sense considering the chaos, just wacky I tell ya. It’s the morning after and I still don’t understand what I witnessed last night. I thought some sleep might help, but nope.

Despite having quite a budget a lot of this looks like a student film. There are some moments of grandeur that look great, others with awful CGI and then really low budget quiet spots that are supposed to convey a large city environment. It’s really weird, it’s as though it was just randomly shot sequences that were compiled to something that maybe resembled a narrative.

I think it was a comedy, I’m not sure though. The theater laughed hysterically at a few parts, particularly one with an erection meeting robin hood. I’m uh, not kidding. Best part of the film. The crazy sequences were neat; I guess, if they had made sense in terms of what was happening. I felt like the whole thing was something crazy trip I was having with Adam Driver being the lead of this journey. The performances ranged from hysterical to bad to sort of cringe oriented.

There were was an odd focus on sexual elements that didn’t really impact anything and so many oddly dropped plot lines throughout. I was left with endless questions understanding that eventually I just had to give up. I love the puzzles of life and trying to think about the philosophical queries of media I consume but there’s just nothing to grasp onto here.

This is straight up the ramblings of an old man that has clearly lost what it means to make a movie. I also have to add this in here, what do the time stop powers have to do with anything? Is it like a psychological wall that Driver’s character needs to get by to perform? Why does he have these powers, what purpose to they serve? Cesar just randomly can stop time but it doesn’t do anything or mean anything!

The Conclusion

Megalopolis is insane, it’s a series of incoherently shuffled scenes scribed by a madman compiled into what is the worst film I’ve ever watched. I’ve seen plenty of bad movies over my life and there’s something about this one that just really tops things off. It’s not even a trip of wow, this is wacky.

Or one where it’s so bad it’s good. It’s just a couple hours of nonsense. Complete and utter nonsense. I was compelled to see this in the theater because I just had to know what it was going to be like and it was an experience like no other. In the fact that it’s just crazy, I don’t even know how to fully capture just how random it is.

Barely anything in the movie resembles a plot of meaning and the resolution is just completely illogical. Not to mention the at times terribly poor acting but I can’t tell if that was just the weird direction as nothing else here makes any sense. Stilted dialogue, tons of random ramblings and just shuffled scenes thrown together.

If you get something out of watching this I’d say it’s a miracle. It’s bad by metrics I don’t even fully understand. Even if I took it as completely being a comedy it still is so odd that I’m dumbstruck but what I viewed. It would take weeks if not months to try and piece together what exactly was being conveyed here. Definitely could have missed out on this one though, horrible movie.

Megalopolis Review at Theather with Standard Viewing

Rating Overall: 0