Francis Ford Coppola's 'Megalopolis' cost $120 million and took decades to make. Critics say it's a 'spectacular catastrophe.'

• Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis" opens in theaters Friday after decades in development.

• The film, set in an imagined New York City, stars Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, and Giancarlo Esposito.

• It has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 51%.

The saga of Francis Ford Coppola bringing his epic new movie "Megalopolis" to the big screen is almost as long and winding as the movie itself.

The project has spent decades in development, with stars like Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio both at one point interested in appearing in it. Coppola even commissioned a symphony for the movie almost two decades before a single frame of it had been shot. After numerous false starts, Coppola finally began filming his fable in 2022 with $120 million of self-financing.

"Megalopolis" is set in an imagined New York City and follows a visionary architect named Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) as he clashes with a corrupt mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) in his quest to rebuild the city after a devastating disaster. The movie also stars Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, and Dustin Hoffman.

Coppola's epic has been mired in controversy since it screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May. There were allegations of on-set misconduct by Coppola, and a trailer by Lionsgate, which is releasing the movie, was pulled after it was discovered it featured fabricated quotes from critics.

The critic response to "Megalopolis" has been no less polarizing. As of publication, the film has a 51% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Here's what critics think of the movie, which opens in theaters Friday.

The movie is a Roman fable — but its cohesion is up for debate

With a runtime of over two hours, Coppola gives us a lot of stars, visual effects, and long-winded soliloquies as Driver's Cesar attempts to build a modern-day Roman empire. But whether it all amounts to anything depends on whom you ask.

"Like almost every idea Mr. Coppola tosses out here, it seems to come out of nowhere and lead to nothing," wrote Kyle Smith at The Wall Street Journal. (For what it's worth, his review appeared in print under the headline "A Spectacular Catastrophe.")

The Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney was more charitable, praising Coppola's effort to create something more challenging than the typical blockbuster fare.

"The 'fable' could almost be an allegory for the pursuit of a dream in which an auteur can still make a monumental epic without compromise in a Hollywood that marginalizes art to focus purely on economics," he wrote.

But, as Collider critic Chase Hutchinson wrote, at the end of the day, the movie's message is hard to parse when it's bending in so many directions at once.

"This is a film that goes for breadth over depth, seemingly trying to be about everything only to end up being about nothing," he wrote.

Coppola's execution isn’t able to match his ambition, and critics are divided over his use of visual effects

Coppola is known for taking big swings, and he's knocked many of those out of the park in his storied career. But with "Megalopolis," some critics felt he struck out.

As The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw put it, the movie is a "passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanity's future."

"It's simultaneously hyperactive and lifeless, lumbered with some terrible acting and uninteresting, inexpensive-looking VFX work which achieves neither the texture of analogue reality nor a fully radical, digital reinvention of existence."

Manohla Dargis at The New York Times disagreed wholeheartedly, naming the movie a Critic's Pick and calling it a "bursting-at-the-seams hallucination of a movie" that's "wonderfully out-there."

Where Bradshaw criticized the film's visual effects, Dargis praised its memorable imagery.

"The beauty of some of his images is overpowering, as in a brief interlude that shows an enormous pale hand reaching across the screen from a bank of clouds to grab the moon, an image that could be right out of early cinema at its most feverishly untamed," Dargis wrote, calling the film's visuals "ravishing."

Critics were baffled by the scene where a real audience member asks a question to an on-screen Adam Driver

One of the most unique aspects of the movie is what happens in the middle of it: someone from the audience — a real, live person — asks a question to Driver's Cesar.

"The screen went black and someone ascended the stage in front of it," The Daily Beast's Esther Zuckerman wrote in her review, explaining how the stunt was pulled off at Cannes.

"For a moment, you could feel the entire theater on edge as if something had gone desperately wrong. Maybe there was a technical issue? Maybe we would need to evacuate? Instead, the person took out a mic and 'played' the role of a reporter asking Adam Driver's character questions at a press conference following a major disaster. Driver, of course, remained on screen and when his answer was finished the man left the stage and returned to his seat in the front row."

The original plan was for this moment to happen at theaters around the world.

"Imagine!" Coppola said with excitement in an interview with The Telegraph. "You could see 'Megalopolis' five times in its opening week and it would be different each time! It would have been the future of the movies and ancient theatre rolled into one!"

Amazon was tasked with creating customized voice recognition software to pull off the moment, but that team was laid off in 2022.

However, some theaters will still execute Coppola's vision this weekend. According to Indiewire, 23 locations in North America will feature a person in the audience addressing Cesar in what is being titled "Megalopolis: The Ultimate Experience."

But even back when the stunt was revealed at Cannes, Zuckerman was puzzled by the choice.

"In a movie full of bizarre and baffling choices, this was maybe the most inexplicable," she wrote. "What is the point? To ostensibly represent living humanity in his movie about the future? Or just for kicks?"

With critics divided, 'Megalopolis' is destined to become a cult classic

"Megalopolis" won't break any box office records, but it very well could become beloved by a small, dedicated group of moviegoers.

"I can't say I was always engaged over its two hours-plus run time, but I was always curious about where it was going next," The Hollywood Reporter's Rooney wrote. "Is it a good movie? Not by a long stretch. But it's not one that can be easily dismissed, either."

"In the end, what matters is the movie, a brash, often beautiful, sometimes clotted, nakedly personal testament," wrote Dargis at The New York Times. "It's a little nuts, but our movies could use more craziness, more passion, feeling and nerve."

"'Megalopolis' is stilted, earnest, over the top, CGI ridden, and utterly a mess," The Daily Beast's Zuckerman wrote. "And yet you can picture a crowded theater shouting along with Jon Voight as he says in one key scene, 'What do you make of this boner I got?'"

Read the original article on Business Insider