Why did I even bother?

We are currently seeing Trump selling his country for parts and he seems hellbent on getting his own cut. Why? We all know he is going to die soon and he doesn’t give a fuck about his children (except maybe Ivanka). So, why does he bother? Some kind of a personal high score?

Francis Ford Coppola didn’t bother. He decided to do the opposite. He also knows he is going to die soon, so he was going to burn his money doing this film. One more grand statement from a director once widely acknowledged as one of the all time great directors after his run in the 70s (Godfather, The Conversation, Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now). Why not sell your vineyard to pay for your project, because you won’t need the money where you are going…

So, was it all worth it? Fuck no.

Everything is just wrong. Let’s go through some of those things, because if I analyzed everything, that would require a book.

First of all, Why people like Dustin Hoffman and Shia LeBeouf? There’s a reason why you don’t see them that much anymore. They both had their own little abuse scandals and were out of the limelight for a reason. Yet, Coppola just hires them and then gets into a scandal of his own… LeBeouf also has very intimate scenes in this movie. What the fuck?

But that’s just the beginning.

According to people on the set, Coppola had a tendency to just decide on the fly what to do. He would arrive on set, get high and then tell everyone what they would be doing on that day. Not really the way to handle major projects. Considering that Coppola had already managed to bankrupt himself previously, one would think he would be a little more careful, but apparently not.

For some reason Cesar, our main character (or is it Cesare? Couldn’t care enough to remember or check), can stop time. I have no idea what the point of that is. He just does it occasionally as some kind of a metaphor for art (which is explained in the dialogue), but that doesn’t really do anything for the movie.

The performances are all over the place. It feels like every actor has a very different view of what movie they are in. Maybe very few of them were on the same set at any point. Some try to take all of this very seriously and others are just chewing scenery in the worst possible way. Even personalities like Aubrey Plaza somehow manage to be very wooden here.

The money used on the film just doesn’t show on screen. Nothing looks very good. Was it planned to have everything look fake? Was it a stylistic decision? If so, why use so much money to do it? At the same time, the movie is very stingy on things like extras as there are crowd scenes with a pathetic nunber of people in them. Apparently, there was a point during the production when the movie had no art department, because Coppola fired all the visual effects people and the art director just resigned after that.

Cesar is supposed to be a genius who is rebuilding the city into something completely new. This kind of a Great Man thinking is very outdated, but the movie fully embraces it even though films like Oppenheimer have worked hard to move away from it. At the same time, those inventions of his shown on screen are just not convincing. For example, at one point he is showing off his device that will let everyone get anywhere in the city only five minutes. However, it’s basically just a fancy looking moving walkway. It moves roughly at walking speed and since you are supposed to walk on them, they couldn’t really be any faster as they would become dangerous. Also, would you really want these to be everywhere? They would have to criss-cross the city, which probably would require them to be on stilts and have raised platforms on basically every intersection, so basically no-one put any thought into any of the technology.

The story is just a mess. For example, at one point there’s a fixer of some kind who promises the mayor to kill his competition. However, instead he isn’t quite killed off-screen, because we get like a second of footage of something falling on him and that’s it. That is the complete extent of that subplot. Why did they even bother leaving it in? It doesn’t feel like there was much more thought put into anything else in this movie.

The world of the movie is also quite a mess. The city is called New Rome and certain characters have names from historic Rome, such as the aforementined Cesar, but also characters like Cicero and Crassus. The worst of this is that the love interest for Cesar is called, drums, please, Julia. As in the feminine of Julius. You know, as in Julius Ceasar. At that point, if your ideas are at this level, maybe just continue with the wines and let other people make movies. At the same time, there’s just random people with random names. Aubrey Plaza’s character is called Wow Platinum. At one point she asks Cesar:

What’s a seven-letter word for “God’s revenge on mankind”?

The answer? “Pandora”. What? How could Pandora, who is from a completely different tradition then God, be God’s wrath, when she was the first woman, according tot he Greek myths? Just nonsense. Or is this trying to imply some kind of a misogynistic idea that all women, starting from the very first one, are problems for men? That’s very, very toxic.

The politics of the movie are just all over the place. Just vibes, no real philosophy or ideology behind any of it, even though it’s supposedly a big part of the movie. The most fun part of the politics is that Jon Voight, a widely known conservative who Trump named as one of his envoys to Hollywood (without even consulting any of them), gives away all of his money to the people to let them rebuild the city to serve all the people instead of just rich landlords.

There’s a famous scene in the middle of the movie, where the movie just stops so that an actor in the audience can ask a question and Adam Driver, as Cesar, answer on the screen. Of course, I can’t do that at home, so instead there’s a jarringly awkward scene in the middle of the movie, which doesn’t have anything to do with anything, where a figure rises, apparently from the audience, to ask the question. Sure, this is something different, but different is not necessarily good. Here it’s just shit.

It’s not funny bad. It’s just bad bad. I get the idea of leaving behind something that matters, but when this is it, you will just be remembered as a joke, as a man who knowlingly destroyed his legacy by making this joke of a movie. And it’s a bad joke at that. If you’re just looking for something weird, there’s so many better choices. If you are looking for something overblown, at least all those subpar action movies have things to distract you from the awful plot and they are generally otherwise quality shit.

This is the kind of shit that people will laugh at in the future. Books about big plunders or weird people will just find room for him. So I guess in a way Coppola managed to obtain immortality. Just not in the way he hoped.