Starring: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Laurence Fishburne, Jason Schwartzman, Talia Shire, Jon Voight, Grace VanderWaal, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman
OUR RATING: ★★★☆☆
Story: Sci-fi drama written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Set in a decaying city following a devastating disaster, Megalopolis (2024) centers on idealist architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) who can manipulate time and strives to rebuild the city as a utopia. Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) opposes him, clinging to a corrupt status quo. Caught between them is Franklyn’s socialite daughter, Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), torn by love and loyalty, seeking her own truth about humanity’s worth.
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Top Megalopolis Quotable Moments
Fundi Romaine: Our American republic is not all that different from old Rome. Can we preserve our past and all its wondrous heritage? Or will we too fall victim, like old Rome, to the insatiable appetite for power of a few men.
Fundi Romaine: When does an empire die? Does it collapse in one terrible moment? No. No. But there comes a time when its people no longer believe in it. Then does an empire begin to die.
Cesar Catilina: Here is my plan, a city that people can dream about.
Mayor Cicero: People don’t need dreams. They need teachers, sanitation, jobs.
Cesar Catilina: Don’t let the now destroy the forever.
Cesar Catilina: [to Cicero] No time to talk of people’s future? Yet there’s always time to convince them to use money they don’t have, to buy things they don’t need, to imitate people they don’t like. Which makes you the chief slumlord and the Mayor of the city of nothing.
Wow Platinum: You’re an obsessive-compulsive wacko, Cesar. You’re anal as hell. I, on the other hand, am oral as hell.
Julia Cicero: [quoting Cesar] “In order to understand time, consciousness, courage, you must identify it in yourself”.
Cesar Catilina: [to Julia] You find me cruel, selfish, and unfeeling? I am. I work without caring what happens to either of us. So go back to the club, “bare it all”, and stalk the kind of people that you enjoy.
Fundi Romaine: You can’t cheat time and you can’t beat time. You can’t touch it, taste it, see it, smell it. Time stops for nobody. And I mean nobody.
Fundi Romaine: Where stands the Colosseum, so stands Rome. When the Colosseum falls, then Rome falls too. And when Rome falls, the world falls with it.
Wow Platinum: “Greed is but a word jealous men inflict upon the ambitious.”
Cesar Catilina: To Wow Platinum and my dear Uncle Hamilton. Together they represent the big three, economics, journalism, and sex appeal.
Julia Cicero: Why do you pretend you’re so bad?
Cesar Catilina: Well, if you pretend to be good, the world won’t take you seriously. But if you pretend to be bad…
Julia Cicero: They kill you.
Cesar Catilina: Pigs in a blanket, that’s what they’re called. Really, the Nobel Prize should be for the person who invented those.
Cesar Catilina: When we leap into the unknown, we prove we are free.
Cesar Catilina: But if it’s our mind that can invent gods, and if from them flows such power, why can’t we apply that power directly?
Clodio Pulcher: Revenge tastes best while wearing a dress.
Wow Platinum: [to Julia] You and I ought to have an understanding. You’re on my territory now, and you’re going to play by my rules! Okay? One, Crassus is mine. Two, the bank is mine. And three, and this may come as a little surprise to you, Cesar’s mine. And he has been, for a long time.
Cesar Catilina: I’ve lost my power. I can’t control time anymore.
Julia Cicero: Artists can never lose their control of time. You taught me that, how painters stop time, how architecture is frozen music, how dancers combine time and space, musicians rhythmatize it, poets sing it.
Teresa Cicero: Only those in a nightmare are capable of praising the moonlight.
Constance Crassus Catilina: Despite what you think, I’m not crazy. My voices say I’m sane.
Cesar Catilina: [to Julia] You’ve taken my life and turned it into something really beautiful, and I can’t create anything without you next to me. No, I mean it. You’re the driving force behind everything. My inspiration comes from you, my clarity comes from you, my patience comes from you. If I can imitate just ten percent of how you are in the world, it would be a success. I’ve never loved anybody like you.
Clodio Pulcher: You want power, you go public, that’s where the real power is.
Nush ‘The Fixer’ Berman: I don’t mind the lightning, but the thunder scares the s**t out of me.
Cesar Catilina: Well, there’s nothing to be afraid of if you love. Or have loved. It’s an unstoppable force. It’s unbreakable. It has no limits. It’s within us. It’s around us. And it’s stretched throughout time. It’s nothing you can touch, yet it guides every decision that we make.
Cesar Catilina: But we do have the obligation to each other to ask questions of one another. What can we do? Is this society, is this way we’re living, the only one that’s available to us? And when we ask these questions, when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.
Cesar Catilina: Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” But trend is not destiny.
Cesar Catilina: Together, we’ll discover new paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.
Mayor Cicero: Utopias offer no ready-made solutions.
Cesar Catilina: Well, they’re not meant to offer solutions, they’re meant to ask the right questions.
Mayor Cicero: Yes, but utopias turn into dystopias.
Cesar Catilina: So, we should just accept this endless conflict that we live in now? Wasn’t it human friendliness that stimulated our brains by “learning”, and enabled us to out-compete all the other species on earth?
Cesar Catilina: “Civilization itself remains the great enemy of mankind.” Rousseau.
Mayor Cicero: You’re quoting Petrarch. To be accurate, misquoting him.
Julia Cicero: “It is the responsibility of leadership to work intelligently with what is given, and not waste time fantasizing about a world of flawless people and perfect choices.” Marcus Aurelius.
Julia Cicero: “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding yourself in the ranks of the insane.” Marcus Aurelius.
Julia Cicero: “The universe is change. Our life is what our thoughts make it.” Marcus Aurelius.
Cesar Catilina: We fight for what we love.
Julia Cicero: But we don’t always win.
Cesar Catilina: There are only two things impossible to stare at very long, the sun and your own soul.
Cesar Catilina: I will not let time have dominion over my thoughts.
Clodio Pulcher: I want it all. I want the moon. And I’m going to have it.
Wow Platinum: We are going up, and they are going down.
Wow Platinum: One, two, three, yippee yay.
Cesar Catilina: I’m not concerned with my place in history. What I am concerned about is time, consciousness, and courage. But what is time, except a curve of past and future around us? What is consciousness, except a burst of the soul from inside? And what is courage, but the beginning of a vital conversation?
Cesar Catilina: We’re in need of a great debate about the future! We want every person in the world to take part in that debate.
Cesar Catilina: You were born with the option to be what you want to be, and must.
Cesar Catilina: Let it not be said that we reduced ourselves to be brutes and mindless beasts of burden. The human being shall rightly be called a great miracle, and a living creature for all to admire! We are such stuff as dreams are made of.
Cesar Catilina: Our Mother Earth gave us the genius to see a future so beautiful that we can’t let it be denied. The gates of Megalopolis are open! Go now, and know our world is changed forever!
Cesar Catilina: There’s still so much to accomplish, but is there time?