There comes a time… When it’s really difficult to rate a film. But if anyone can make that challenge of measuring folly and genius feel good, it’s going to be Francis Ford Coppola. No matter the quirks on his CV, his huge milestones of the 1970s are unimpeachable. So the thought of Megalopolis, his epic, self-funded exploration of art, creation and humanity’s future through the prism of an Ancient Roman spat, should be Bread and Circuses for any film fan.

In an alternate present-day, New York is recast as New Rome, a metropolis that’s fallen hook, line and sinker into the cycle of the end of the Roman Republic. The effortlessly watchable and lovingly intense Adam Driver is Cesar Catalina, genius creative architect and dreamer of a dysfunctional elite family headed by his bank-owning uncle Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voigt).

Catalina is more than gifted; he can pause time. But as a man with time to waste, he still struggles to recognise his vision for the future, made possible by his invention of the incredible new material Megalon. To the establishment, the visionary is staging a coup on the city, and his fiercest critic is Giancarlo Esposito’s Mayor Frank Cicero. The pair’s ideological battle deepens when Cicero’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), becomes romantically entangled with Catalina.

A lot is going on in Megalopolis, and it’s no surprise that not all of it sticks, but it’s conspicuous in a film about fantastical architecture. If anything, the scope of Coppola’s long-brewing opus isn’t big enough. It can’t possibly live up to the hype and the weight of incredible, sense-defying imagery crossing the breadth of film history—there are some undeniably jaw-dropping visuals—it isn’t anywhere near enough. What’s left scuffs the intrigue of the real and ancient conspiracies that inspired it, leaving the focus on its weakly sketched human connection.

The buildup to Megalopolis has pinned on Coppola’s extraordinary CV. Inarguable classics, troubled productions, unfathomable missteps as he veered from dictator to debtor. Here it’s the latter, with the partial sale of his vineyard helping to fund what struggles to break through as a vanity project.

For some viewers, Megalopolis will represent a place where cinema could have gone, a less narrative-led, fusion of extraordinary, expressionist visions. Its sweep isn’t just back to the height of Rome, but the innovative early days of cinema, like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But, like the elite struggling with the masses on the streets of New Rome, Megalopolis doesn’t do enough to sway the will of the cinema-going public. 

The laboured parallel with ancient Rome is constant. It’s chiselled in graphic titles, although the early shot of the Beaux-Arts Grand Central Station reminds us that it’s been running through New York for some time. Still, Coppola chooses a niche part of the Roman Republic and rides on viewers’ familiarity with the Roman Empire. Cicero takes his name from the legendary orator and politician, a name—derived from chickpeas—that suggests a broad ideological difference from Catalina’s extreme wealth. 

While Esposito is part of a weight of talent on display—most, like Jason Schwartzman and Dustin Hoffman, wasted—they all struggle in the sweeping scale. Shia LaBeouf has some fascinating moments on his particular journey to becoming a populist politician, but his character is not one of fiction’s great instigators. While swathes of Megalopolis plumb Shakespeare, it’s not smart enough to balance the intrigue and clowning, the broad brushstrokes of assassination, riot, heart attack and a Soviet satellite destroying half the city (named Carthage, of course). That’s most clear in the way it arranges its players—some characters disappear for long periods. 

Perhaps the extended biography at the heart of this city runs even deeper than it seems. Soft and deep focus costs the action, but creates a gauche playground—dystopia to some, utopia to others—that could be Coppola’s career. In the magical fantasy element that later fuses with science fiction, Coppola could be wishing an artist’s ability to hold time was real. The many biographical and personal touches, including the potential naming of a newborn baby as Francis, suggest it is as much a lament as a self-evaluation. It just falls a bit short. It’s just missing a girder or two.