Francis Ford Copolla’s Urban Planning Swan Song

“Without Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, this film probably would not exist at all. From the Christopher Nolan Batman series, we get heroic shots of architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), the protagonist, peering down at New York City—which has the unsubtle allegorical name of New Rome, and where Catilina is head of the Design Authority—from on high. There’s a bit of Tim Burton’s wacky darkness, too. At the same time, the film’s campiness occasionally veers into John Waters territory.”

It was nearly four decades in the making—in other words, about as much time as a major urban infill development in California. Although the end product is not worthy of such sustained effort, Megalopolis is one of those rare films that explicitly celebrates architecture and urbanism, and it deserves to be memorialized, if only for that reason.

“Essentially, Catilina proposes for New Rome an updated version of mid-20th century urban renewal—although it’s not clear whether Coppola actually supports slum clearance or is simply daydreaming. Not coincidentally, he would have lived through the era of the great bulldozings and surely remembers it well. At best, Catilina’s plan is a metaphor for human creativity and unattainable benevolence. His other quirk is that he can stop time, which is a metaphor for the fact that humans cannot, in fact, stop time.”