MEGALOPOLIS

Here is the decision, plainly. Francis Ford Coppola — the master behind THE GODFATHER — has spent decades and a fortune on this satirical fantasy, and there is real ambition on the screen. But ambition isn't the same as a film you should give your evening to.

MEGALOPOLIS descends again and again into silly melodrama. Worse, it preaches a godless, Marxist utopia so naïve it never reckons with the human heart. And it earns its R with heavy profanity, cocaine use, and a long, explicit incestuous sex scene.

There's one flicker of moral clarity: the film's two young villains are ultimately destroyed by the very lust, greed, and jealousy that bind them. But that thread can't redeem the whole. Our answer is simple — skip it, and spend the two-plus hours on something that feeds rather than fatigues you.

New York City has been reimagined as New Rome — corrupt, glittering, and run on greed. Into it strides Caesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a visionary architect who wants to tear down the old and build a utopia for all humanity.

The city's mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), would rather build a casino, and he despises Caesar's dream. When Caesar falls for the mayor's daughter, Julia, he ignites the mayor's fury — and stirs jealousy in a jilted mistress and a resentful cousin with ambitions of his own. The stage is set for a five-sided collision.

Two stars, and here is what they mean: this is a film with a famous director's fingerprints all over it that still can't hold itself together. Coppola borrows character names from a minor Roman political skirmish of 63 BC, then abandons the history almost entirely, and the result is a movie that mistakes grandeur for coherence.

Too often it collapses into unintentional comedy. A wounded Caesar moans "No, no, no, no!" A wealthy uncle abruptly produces a little bow and arrow to murder a deceitful relative. The five-sided romantic tangle the film sets up narrows into a simple power struggle, and the visual invention on display never earns the weight the story wants to carry. There are ideas here, but they don't cohere into a film worth recommending.

MEGALOPOLIS is Coppola's dark, Neo-Marxist vision of American society and its free-enterprise system. New Rome is a place of greed and corruption, and the movie half-mocks America only to steer toward the humanist dream it promotes at the end.

That dream is a one-world Marxist utopia. Coppola even invents a pledge of allegiance — patterned on America's, but promising "one earth, indivisible, with justice, education and equality for all," pointedly dropping the words "under God." The central architect wields a glowing T-square shaped like a cross, casting himself as a kind of humanist messiah. It is a Romantic, wildly naïve view of human nature that never grapples with why utopias fail.

Scripture already named the flaw. The pledge leaves out God; the film leaves out the truth of Genesis 8:21 — "the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth." Without God, can there be real peace, love, or justice at all?

Yet even here the film contradicts itself. Its two young villains, Clodio and the uncle's scheming wife, are consumed by the incestuous relationship they build on lust, greed, jealousy, and revenge. Sin still collects its wage on screen. And the deepest longing the movie can't satisfy — a city where all things are made right — is the one Scripture promises God alone will build: "the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God" (Revelation 21:2).

Coppola poured a lifetime and a fortune into this dream, and there's no doubting his ambition. But a godless utopia, an explicit incest scene, heavy profanity, and drug use add up to a film that costs far more than it gives. So here is our answer, the same one we opened with: skip it. Looking for something to enjoy together instead? Start with our latest family-friendly picks.