With a runtime of over two hours, Coppola gives us a lot of stars, visual effects, and long-winded soliloquies as Driver’s Cesar attempts to build a modern-day Roman empire. But whether it all amounts to anything depends on whom you ask.
“Like almost every idea Mr. Coppola tosses out here, it seems to come out of nowhere and lead to nothing,” wrote Kyle Smith at The Wall Street Journal. (For what it’s worth, his review appeared in print under the headline “A Spectacular Catastrophe.”)
The Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney was more charitable, praising Coppola’s effort to create something more challenging than the typical blockbuster fare.
“The ‘fable’ could almost be an allegory for the pursuit of a dream in which an auteur can still make a monumental epic without compromise in a Hollywood that marginalizes art to focus purely on economics,” he wrote.
But, as Collider critic Chase Hutchinson wrote, at the end of the day, the movie’s message is hard to parse when it’s bending in so many directions at once.
“This is a film that goes for breadth over depth, seemingly trying to be about everything only to end up being about nothing,” he wrote.