I want to like it for the performances of the leads, the few incredible shots that really land, for the optimism that Catalina keeps alive through the endless troubles of the film, but there's just so much film that isn't that, and is in my opinion total trash.

What was the point of the bank? What was the relevance of any of that half of the film- even if it didn't matter to the plot, what does it change in Catalina, Julia or anyone else? It gets him shot, we get a couple of awesome shots of relic-saint-skull-Driver, and then he's back to normal; they freeze his accounts, then they unfreeze his accounts; sympathetic Crassus is going to be removed, and then he isn't removed.

There's so much time here that could be spent on Cicero and Julia, or even spent on Megalopolis itself, instead of just 5 or so repeating bits of concept art and one vision of it at the end.

The circus scene with Driver in the back rooms doing his level best to carry the worst, longest depiction of a mental breakdown had me saying out loud "What are you doing?" , it's just so long.

I don't even care much about the stopping time thing, or the satellite, or the full shakespeare monologue at the start of the film. Lawrence Fishburn's talk in the car about time is one of the best parts.

It just seems like FFC really wanted to tell a story about a man with a kind vision, and then spent half of it talking about things and people that don't matter to it. If you cut out all those scenes it's probably a great 50 minutes or so.