I have never had so many mixed feelings about a film before.

I will forever love “Megalopolis” for giving Aubrey Plaza the opportunity to go full femme fatale with her signature witchy wildness mixed in. It truly seems like a role she was born to play.

While Plaza steals every scene she is in, Adam Driver is the star of the show as Cesar, the head of the mysterious Design Authority that is destroying buildings in an attempt to build a utopia in a New York City that has turned into a modern Rome three centuries into the future from now.

Nathalie Emmanuel unfortunately is a little distracting as Julia with an in-and-out accent meant to match the natural bravado of the voices Giancarlo Esposito and Kathryn Hunter have as her parents. If you can get past that, she does a beautiful job playing Julia.

She is the party girl daughter of the mayor, Cicero (Esposito), who is intrigued when she witnesses Cesar stop time and later stand up to her father.

She seems set out to stop Cesar at first but quickly winds up joining him in his quest to build the utopia generated through his revolutionary material, megalon, which is used in the film to build structures, replay memories, make clothing and more.

With strong, heartfelt performances by Emmanuel and Driver, I found some of the more megalomaniac-style performances by Jon Voight and Shia LaBeouf severely off-putting at points. They both pretty much play the characters they’ve played their whole careers, especially LaBeouf.

Yes, Plaza does some over-the-top work, too, but she does it in a way that is utterly compelling, especially after some more subdued roles in “The White Lotus” and “My Old Ass.”

I have been a fan of both Plaza and Emmanuel for a while now, and I am glad filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola gave them both opportunities to shine.

Coppola has been working on “Megalopolis” for 40 years, as discussed in the rambling pre-film Q&A that was part of the screening I attended last night. I do appreciate some of the grandeur of the the film and its Shakespearean scale, but it does come through that this has been reworked a lot.

While I love a good think piece, “Megalopolis” seems to be caught up in ideas, concepts and intellectuality without a lot of substance behind it.

Sure, there are the classical power struggles influenced by Roman mythology, but there isn’t much new to say.

“Megalopolis” is somehow very heavy handed while also giving vibes of how important it is to find common ground with money-grubbing psychopaths. On that note, it becomes a little too simplistic, especially in the complicated times we are living in.

Rating: 3/5