What a mess. I wouldn't've minded so much if it was more original and well paced. The opening scenes are rushed (Babylon did the nightclubbing better) and there's too much exposition (much as I enjoy Larry Fishburne's sonorous delivery). The philosophical musings are incoherent, pretentious, recycled, inaccurate. Uninsightful! Gladiatorial Rome! Shakespeare! Adam Driver's Robert Moses-alike has an Emersonian mind! — and Coppola somehow has all the time in the world for these momentum-destroying languors but little for the action he considered necessary to include. A plot of some kind does progress but connective tissue is often lacking. The conclusion of it all is a baby! — but not a star baby.
The cast was intriguing. Mayor Giancarlo Esposito was very poorly used, ditto his fixer Dustin Hoffman. Shia LaBeouf got the Dennis Hopper role. Nathalie Emmanuel as the mayor's daughter was mostly tasked with standing around looking attentive and available. Connie Corleone (Talia Shire, Coppola's sister) was Driver's mum, Jon Voigt his bank-owning uncle, Fishburne his factotum. Jason Schwartzman performed like he's in a Will Anderson. Balthazar Getty I did not see.
For all that Aubrey Plaza (stealing scenes like a criminal) is a lot of fun as "Wow Platinum", a foxy TV/stock market floor reporter on the make. She has her own conception of integrity and uses what she has (sex) in pursuit of becoming part of a power couple. Somehow city-planning superman/creative Driver isn't interested but Voigt knows a rejuvenator when he sees one. Her sex scene with LaBeouf made me laugh so hard. She copped it late in the day in an unsuccessful Cleopatra getup, and not to slight her hard vamping but surely Coppola must've realised his movie was in trouble when she's the hottest thing going despite the acres of hot young flesh. (Often the gyrating and air-pawing of these hot young things are at total odds with the rest of the scene, such as when we and Esposito have to suffer Driver's Hamlet pretensions at a building site.)
Perhaps most fatal to the whole project is Coppola's dated conception of everything from cities to information dissemination (newspapers! just like Citizen Kane). His objective often seems to be to remake bits of famous movies like Ben Hur, Gladiator, the unbounded lurv of Interstellar ... 1980s wrestling (and not The Wrestler). The odd scene or sequence gropes for something fantastic like Gilliam's Brazil or a Malick (The Tree of Life). Perhaps he had in mind Kubrick's outro Eyes Wide Shut but all along I couldn't get Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996) out of mine.
It's difficult to say what this movie has and hasn't; for all I know the multiverse is in there somewhere. Coppola needs to crank out a director's cut that adds coherence. Is scifi really the only genre sufficiently capacious to address our times?
Very widely covered in the media. The coverage is bipolar (pump or dump) and mostly unnuanced. I didn't read the reviews before seeing it and have no appetite for them now.
