Megalopolis is one of the worst big-budget movies ever made

There were two instancesof audience interaction at the Toronto International Film Festival's lonepress screening of Megalopolis.

The first involved aman, ostensibly hired by the production team, who stood up midway through the movieand walked to the front of the theatre. As the house lights inexplicably went up,hewent to a microphone stand hidden off to the side, looked down at a piece of paper and asked Adam Driver's on-screen character a question. Arecording of Driver's character looked down from the screenand responded, as if in a press conference.

Thisfourth wall-breaking element of the moviehas been widely reported on as occurring at other screeningsand built substantial buzz around the movie's ambitious and unorthodox techniques. Butat the TIFFscreening, there was another.Inascene where one of our dizzying cast ofcharacters is arrested,police sirens go off. At thetime,an actual alarm blared throughout the theatre,ringingconsiderably louder thanthe sirens on screen.

In a testament to the bizarre, self-indulgentmess that is Megalopolis, it took me 20 minutes to realize the alarm wasn't another experimentalpart of the movie. It was just an alarm.

It's around here that a normal review would subtly transition to a summary of the plot. Unfortunately, Megalopolis is such a rambling, boring slog, I'm not sure I grasped the story writer and director Francis Ford Coppola actually had in mind.

What I could keep track of is this: inexplicably influential architect Cesar Catilina (Driver), vindictivemayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and influential banker Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight) are locked in a sort of power struggle for the future of thefictional city of New Rome.At the same time, outside elements including Crassus's scheming, power-hungry son Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf) and corrupt newshound Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) are willing to do just about anything to find themselves at the top of the pile when that struggle comes to an end.

There's also Franklyn's idealistic daughter Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel) and Catilina's dedicated assistant and the film's narrator Fundi Romaine (Laurence Fishburne),who attempts to support Catilina in his endeavours to remake the city. Along with those characters and a baker's dozen of other equally obtrusive names there'sa convoluted mix of subplots involving time manipulation, magical metal and a decommissioned satellitehurtling toward Earth.

More than 300 rewrites over span of decades

To be fair, "mix" may not actually be the best word. Because these elementsdo not come together to build a message out of the madness namely, a warning aboutthe internal forces that take down empires such as Rome and the United States, according to Coppola.

Instead, Megalopolis stands as a testament to mixed metaphors, flabby writing and thestubborn self-assuredness of thinking you're the smartest person in the room.

Part of this incomprehensible slew of ideas could have come from the process behind them.A passion project for Coppola, Megalopolishas apparently suffered through more than 300 rewrites over the span of decades,according to Variety. Thatincludes daily adjustments, rewrites and additions as Emmanuel shared on the red carpet at TIFF while the film was being shot.

The intent to compare the fall or Rome with the projected fall of the U.S.does lead to one of Megalopolis's sole points of value.The parallels between Megalopolis's Cicero and Catilinaand their Roman counterparts' competing interpretations of the value of the republic as well as their involvement in the Catilinian plot to overthrow it will be interesting to those with an eye for history.

But with this collage of inspirations, instead of getting Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, we get something more like Sean Penn's infamouslyunintelligible Trump-inspired novel Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff.

Coppola hides any interesting examinations behind an impenetrable fog of symbols.There are crying statues laying their weapons down on the ground as Catilina drives by them. There are ghosts of long-lost lovers lying in secret rooms. There are political rallies with some dim intended commentary on modern politics.But it's all so scattered and poorly engineered that it makes little to no sense to anyone but Coppola and the most generous audience memberswilling to devisea meaning for themselves.

If nothing else, Megalopolis will teach creators one thing: inaccessibilityisn't a virtue. The unfortunate lesson every ambitious young screenwriterneeds to learn is that stuffing your story with so many high-minded metaphors that your viewersare left scratching their heads doesn't make you a genius.

Self-funded effort

Challenging and innovative messages are a high bar thatthe best storytellers occasionally clear, but it is only after satisfying their first responsibility to theaudience: to make something with intention, and work to make yourself understood.

Self-funded with more than $100 million US by an artist who is impossibly wealthy after early career successes, Megalopolisworks against its audience. This was presaged by the early promotion of the movie, which generated fake quotes from high-profile critics, pushing the narrative that Coppola is a misunderstood geniusforced to curtail his iconoclastic plans because of a hostile public.

By paying for everything himself, he is able to do what he's never been able to before: bypass wary investors who might push back against antagonizing an audience with self-important nonsense.

Inaccessible to the point of satire, Megalopolis also tarnishes Coppola's legacy.This is no Godfather. It is not The Rainmaker. It's not even Jack. It is, however,among the worst big-budget productions ever made a late-career echo ofHeaven's Gate, the sprawlingvanity projectbyThe Deer Hunterdirector Michael Ciminothat was so monumentally awful it ruined Hollywood's trust in auteur directors for decades.

With mostly his own money at stake, Coppola's latest may not have as big an effect on the future of film. But navel-gazey to the point of irresponsibility, sanctimonious to the point of insulting,Megalopolis is still a cautionary tale though not about the entropic nature of empires and civilization. It's a warning aboutwhat too much money, too much self-seriousnessand too little editing can do to an artist.