If the script for Francis Ford Coppola’s new film, Megalopolis, was the blueprint for a building, it would never get built. The renderings would look too weird, too ungainly, too ugly. It would not make it past a design review board or a building and safety inspection. No bank would ever fund it. 

Fortunately, for anyone who enjoys cinematic spectacle, Coppola needs to bow to neither democracy nor capitalism. He is a dictator, and he’s worth around $400 million. At 88, Coppola likely feels free to do whatever he wants. With $120 million of his own money, he has willed into existence one of the most monumental and bizarre films ever to explore the urban condition.

It was nearly four decades in the making—in other words, about as much time as a major urban infill development in California. Although the end product is not worthy of such sustained effort, Megalopolis is one of those rare films that explicitly celebrates architecture and urbanism, and it deserves to be memorialized, if only for that reason. (I don’t mind having taken one for the team.)

Megalopolis, which has nothing to do with the Boston-D.C. conurbation of the same name, is not so much a movie as it is a collection of other movies spliced into a loose plot inspired by ancient Rome. Let us count the influences, quotations, and allusions. 

Without Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, this film probably would not exist at all. From the Christopher Nolan Batman series, we get heroic shots of architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), the protagonist, peering down at New York City—which has the unsubtle allegorical name of New Rome, and where Catilina is head of the Design Authority—from on high. There’s a bit of Tim Burton’s wacky darkness, too. At the same time, the film’s campiness occasionally veers into John Waters territory. 

Hamlet weighs in, including “To Be or Not To Be” delivered in its entirety by Catilina; Julius Caesar, for the fall of empire and the general obsession with the Classical world; and allusions to every other tragedy that deals in power, hubris, and rivalry. Through twists, turns, drug binges, and a near-death experience, Catilina’s idealism runs into the pragmatism of Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Both must confront the forces of wealth and unrest; both stalk the shadows of Gotham … er, New Rome. 

Ayn Rand’s well-known screeds, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, contribute heartily to Catilina’s flimsy character: the brilliant, insufferable architect and the supergenius who invents a wonder material that can be used to heal bullet wounds, build skyscrapers, and power luminescent moving walkways. (On that count, Catilina seems to have made a few trips to Wakanda.) The difference between Howard Roak, John Galt, and Catilina is that Catilina is genuinely benevolent: he wants his designs and materials to uplift the masses. In other words, he’s delusional.

Coppola pays homage to fellow octogenarian Robert Caro. Catilina is presented as an alternative-reality version of Robert Moses: an inexplicably powerful, but unelected, city official. He has the look of Frank Lloyd Wright, waving his cape as he strides purposefully into the future. (More accurately, Catilina isn’t so much an architect as he is a planner, materials scientist, and huge bore.) He’s also awkward and dorky, disingenuously suave, and a fan of recreational drugs, and he wears every shade of black imaginable. Not unlike a certain petulant industrialist we all know.

Essentially, Catilina proposes for New Rome an updated version of mid-20th century urban renewal—although it’s not clear whether Coppola actually supports slum clearance or is simply daydreaming. Not coincidentally, he would have lived through the era of the great bulldozings and surely remembers it well. At best, Catilina’s plan is a metaphor for human creativity and unattainable benevolence. His other quirk is that he can stop time, which is a metaphor for the fact that humans cannot, in fact, stop time. 

Catilina’s brilliance is not entirely arbitrary. Coppola spent some of his $120 million to commission studies by the design firm Oxman, founded by Neri Oxman (who also appears in the film), which relies on a lot of high minded rhetoric like “design solutions by, for, and with Nature while advancing humanity.” Those studies informed Catilina’s designs—and his idealism. (Whether Oxman can accomplish what Catilina professes remains to be seen.)

Other aspects of the art direction, especially depictions of New Rome’s upper crust, comes straight out of Hunger Games (minus Stanley Tucci, alas), with touches of Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video. Catilina occupies the penthouse office of the Chrysler Building, having apparently evicted one of the great icons of the modern world, Pan American Airlines President Juan Trippe. 

Megalopolis itself, Catilina’s fantastical infill project meant to replace a huge swath of Manhattan tenements, is pure biomimicry, mixing the swoops of Zaha Hadid with the psychedelia of Avatar. Catilina’s intention to demolish a thriving neighborhood in Manhattan recalls none other than Le Corbusier. And when Catilina falls into a coma, we find out that what the most storied filmmaker of the 20th century really wanted to direct was a 1980s perfume ad. 

What else? 

There’s a lost Cirque du Soleil routine, a lost Taylor Swift video, and a professional wrestling bout. There’s A Beautiful Mind, Iron Man, Gladiator, and The Truman Show. Less cheerily, we get shades of Trainspotting, Succession, Brazil, and Fox News. Shia LeBeouf plays Clodio Pulcher, a scion-turned-populist-MAGA-ish figure, and there’s a cameo by one-quarter of the band Phantom Planet. In Lawrence Fishburn (Fundi Romaine) and Driver (Catilina), we get veterans of the Star Wars franchise—in which, you’ll recall, a republic turns into an empire, and a certain caped, helmeted, black-clad character terrorizes the townsfolk. 

We cannot forget Midnight Cowboy, about hard-luck cases getting by in the grittiest corners of 1969 New York. Coppola reunites the film’s stars in a decidedly different city. John Voight plays New Rome’s richest man, Hamilton Crassus III. Dustin Hoffman’s character, Nush Berman, has no apparent purpose. But, let’s be glad he’s there, looking a lot healthier than he did last time he appeared with Voight.

Finally, in a brief dream sequence, Coppola briefly quotes one of the strips of celluloid that started it all: A Trip to the Moon. And thus the history of cinema comes full circle. Megalopolis is not so much a movie as it is a collection of movies and cultural quotations. All of Coppola’s influences will remain frozen in time as our actual empire crumbles. 

Are you exhausted yet? Are you not entertained? If you can hold all of that together in your mind, you know exactly what Megalopolis is like. And, I suppose, you know what real cities are like: They are about design, power, poverty, philosophy, science, history, transportation, transgression, love, lust, pettiness, and power. In no particular order.