PRAISE: Following its premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival the handful of quick quotes about the movie from handful of critics made me think I was going to walk into an undefineable mess of a movie. Fortunately I was able to follow several story threads in this movie about Cesar, inventor of a living building substance called Megalon going head to head with Mayor Franklyn Cicero who wants things to remain the same in New Rome. None of the performances in the film were bad , I actually think every actor gave it their all including: Talia Shire, Laurence Fishburne, Jon Voight, Giancarlo Esposito and Kathryn Hunter. Writer/director Francis Ford Coppola infuses a lot of himself into the character Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) so passionate about what he wants the same way Coppola put his own money into this film because he felt it must be made. As Cicero’s daughter Julia, Nathalie Emmanuel turns in a beautiful and loving performance. As Cesar’s cousin Clodio, Shia LaBeouf fit right in with how quirky and odd his character is. I even laughed at a few darkly humorous lines he had. Speaking of quirky as Wow Platinum Aubrey Plaza was pretty funny to watch her go through the motions to attempt to get what she wants in life was entertaining. Coppola is definitely keeping up with the pulse of the world as he places certain scenes filled with modern politics, battles over real estate and what's to be done with it and if it will benefit the people. Some things were definitely on the nose which i didn't have a problem with because i found it entertaining. One scene really caught me off guard and it was so quietly directed it added to how very involving it was. I did like most of the visuals.
PROBLEMS: As the movie dived more into its 2 hour 12 minute running time. I started seeing odd ball, drawn out moments as just padding. I even tried to reason with why certain things were happening in the movie. Did I really need to see this or that?
Im not sure why some characters were in the movie because they barely had lines and vanished quickly. There's some awful bad green screen scenes in the movie. In the end the movie just feels like it was trying to be to many things. Shakespearian, artistic, futuristic and political and it just collapses under the weight of it all.
Scale of 1 to 10 a 5