The film Megalopolis is already the stuff of cinema legend. The 40+ year passion project of Godfather and Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola, no studio wanted to give the movie financing. Coppola sold part of his winery to make it with his own money and had to pay Lionsgate’s marketing costs before they would distribute it in theaters. The result was both a critical and commercial flop, with many critics and fans calling it an utter disaster of a movie.

Because so much of the conversation around Megalopolis has revolved around the person making it, the story of how it was made, and how bad the movie is, little has been said about the ideas the movie is trying to explore. Deep ideas are explored about America’s place in the world and how to move forward. They may be buried beneath an overall bad movie, but the ideas themselves are important and worth engaging.

Megalopolis takes place in an alternate American New York called “New Rome.” In this world, the rich live lives of self-indulgent decadence while the poor suffer in inescapable poverty. This is a world—we’re told—that is on the brink of collapse because the rich are squandering their wealth and the poor have no relief from their suffering.

We see these vividly in the characters of Hamilton Crassus III (John Voight), the wealthy head of Crassus National Bank, his son Clodio Pulchur (Shia LaBeouf), and his wife Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza). Crassus spends his time making and enjoying his money while Pulchur and Platinum spend theirs scheming how to get access to it, throwing his business and the city into chaos.

Already the film’s premise parallels common conversations about modern-day America. Pieces comparing the US to Rome abound: “No, Really, Are We Rome?”; “Has America Entered the Fall of Rome?”; “The U.S. Faces the Same Risks Ancient Rome Faced in Caesar’s Day”; “Are We Focused on the Wrong Rome?” All point to the parallels between modern America and Rome’s power-hungry infighting and economic mismanagement by elites. Meanwhile, a 2023 Gallup poll found Americans continue to have historically low levels of trust in our institutions, giving rise to fears of a destructive populism that might lead to tyranny.

Megalopolis has two heroes trying to stop this collapse, with two different views of how to do that. Their battle of worldviews is the central conflict of the film. Unfortunately, both of their worldviews lead to a post-liberal order of oppression for ordinary people.

Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) is a noble maintainer of the status quo. He sees the poverty and violence in his city but does not see hope in changing the system. So he partners with Hamilton Crassus to establish casinos that will bring in revenue that will—presumably—allow him to provide more for the suffering people of the city.

Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is the film’s protagonist and genius inventor billionaire who is also the Chairman of the Design Authority in New Rome. He sees the problems in society as well. He wants to use his authority to build a futuristic city made from a substance he invented called “Megalon,” which will eliminate poverty and therefore crime for all who live there.

Cicero, as Mayor, tries to stop him from carrying out his plan:

Cicero: “People don’t need dreams! People need help now!”

Catilina: “Don’t let the now destroy the forever.”

This initial argument over how to save their civilization boils down to an investment vs. distributionist strategy. Do we save the civilization by investing in new technologies, systemic changes, and infrastructure, or by taking the resources that we already have and redistributing them to the needy?

America has often had this debate. Back when we were spending exorbitant resources putting a man on the moon, many people questioned if it was worth the cost. Why not use that money to help the poor in the country? (A debate portrayed in the excellent film “First Man.”) Today those questions persist. When Elon Musk spent $44 billion buying Twitter, he said he did it to support free speech in the public square. But people have called him out for not using more money to alleviate poverty directly through charity. Likewise, America is giving a great deal of money to Ukraine to aid them in the fight against Russian invasion to check an aggressive imperial power. But many Americans don’t think we should spend all of that money overseas when it could be used to help Americans at home.

Megalopolis sides with the investors over the distributors in the film. Cesar argues that if we only focus on distribution, on using the money we generate from capitalism just to give people welfare, then we just continue the cycle of poverty and giving handouts. If we innovate so that we change life in a significant way, then that cycle can be broken.

This investor view has been borne out in significant ways historically. Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, for example, led to the biggest jump in wealth for all income classes and the biggest drop in poverty and child mortality in history as demonstrated in Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy’s Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know and Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin’s How the World Became Rich. Government projects like the Transcontinental Railroad also vastly improved the economy and lives of ordinary people. And while it took a lot of money to be involved in foreign conflicts against the Nazis and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, I think most people would agree beating them made the world better.

Yet, while things like capitalism have reduced absolute poverty, it has increased inequality. And inequality is a big factor in society’s instability. So Cesar—and Megalopolis’s—dismissal of distribution is ultimately shortsighted. There have to be some mechanisms—of government and civil society—through which we can ensure that all are free and able to benefit from the resources gained by innovation.

But while this part of the Cesar vs. Cicero conflict might be described as loosely “right-wing” vs. “left-wing” in contemporary politics, another part is not. When Cesar and Cicero sit down in Cesar’s home—a pilot “Megalopolis”—another worldview difference emerges.

Cicero warns Cesar that utopias always become dystopias. Human nature is violent and competitive. And building cities or societies which assume that if you just change the environment humans will stop being that way, will always make life worse, not better. Cesar refuses to agree. He argues that cooperation, not competition, is central to human nature and that we must change society to fit that reality or we will never make society better than it is now.

This is the central American political conflict laid out by economist Thomas Sowell in his book A Conflict of Visions. One vision (typically associated with conservatives) is that human nature is “constrained,” while the other (typically associated with liberals) is that human nature is “unconstrained.” The constrained view sees human nature, and therefore the optimal human society, as fixed. Human beings are selfish, and you can’t change them from being that way. You can only set up society to optimize their selfishness for the good of all. The unconstrained view is that human beings don’t have a set nature. Therefore, it’s possible to set up society in such a way that it will change them into a better version of themselves.

Both of these views have something to recommend them, and both have been tools of oppression. The “constrained” view has been used to justify slavery, racism, and legal discrimination against women. Aristotle saw slavery as natural. Too often, what we see as “human nature” is merely convention. Worse, it is a convention that the powerful use to oppress and exploit the weak.

But the unconstrained view has just as often been used for oppression. The communist regimes and Eugenics movements of the twentieth century built their ideas around the belief that science, culture (through propaganda), and political force could reshape humans into their image of a perfect society without poverty, violence, or oppression. The result for the communists was simply a new oppressive political class, genocide, black markets, and eventually being bankrupt trying to compete with a society (America) that was built on a more constrained view of human nature. (Something the Netflix show 3 Body Problem showed very well).

The traditional Western answer is to optimize the private sphere and local governments. That means potentially dangerous new ideas can spread among parties that freely consent to them, or among smaller local communities, before being imposed by force on the rest of society. If those communities do well with that innovation, then others will be inspired and adopt them. If not, the harm will be minimized, and concentrated on that specific locale.

Of course, because this is the “traditional” answer, it becomes part of the “constrained” vs. “unconstrained” binary in the culture wars. Those in the “unconstrained” camp see the limits this places on making society better. Some problems suffer from a “collective action problem,” where individuals struggle to prevent bad behavior unless everyone does, but nobody is willing to accrue the risk of being the first one to do it. One solution to this problem is to use a strong government to impose an answer on society all at once. For example, it took a strong federal government to impose freedom for the slaves and desegregation on the states.

Today, people like Dr. Jonathan Haidt argue that it will take the federal government to stop the harms of smartphones on children and teens. That’s because kids who want to stop using smartphones face steep costs if they distance themselves from screens; they will be cut off from the social life of their peers online. Some outside regulator is needed instead to take it out of everyone’s hands at once.

But this is not so much an argument against optimizing the private and local government spheres as it is not being ideologically rigid about them. There is a place for the government to take a strong role in coercing conformity. But it shouldn’t be all—or even most—of life. As Dr. Joseph Loconte often points out, before the Enlightenment, Protestants and Catholics would take turns imposing their Utopias on each other. No one had the option to pick a ruler who would simply leave them alone.

That’s the problem at the heart of Megalopolis. At the end of the film, Cesar has made his ideal city, despite Cicero and others’ attempts to stop him. His enemies are all dead—except for Cicero, who has made up with him. Cesar’s values have been validated. And we are supposed to cheer all of this, as New Rome allegedly has been saved. And yet, those who are paying attention can see that there is a darkness here that is being overlooked. Cesar isn’t simply a billionaire like Elon Musk. He holds tremendous political authority as the Chairman of the Design Authority. This means he isn’t just risking his money, but imposing his vision of the world on others. But, as Mayor, so is Cicero.

The world of Megalopolis is one where ordinary people have no choice but to have their fates imposed upon them. They can only choose which oppressor. It has no vision of change that doesn’t rely upon powerful men imposing their will on society by force. This is a return to a world of pre-liberal democracy, where the only choices are Protestant vs. Catholic oppression or Fascists vs. Communists, etc.

Ironically, this is how Rome actually fell. When Megalopolis pictures the collapse of Rome it fears it shows violence in the streets and crumbling cities. But the Roman Republic was first lost when it stopped being a republic and started being a tyranny. This is how America will fall too. If we—like Megalopolis—stop being able to imagine an alternative to tyranny, then tyranny is what we will have.

Megalopolis has a philosophy. One that parallels deeply with current American political thought. But its philosophy is ultimately one that can’t see past totalitarianism as the answer to our problems. Therefore, Cicero is right: it is inevitably a dystopian one.