Francis Ford Coppola's bizarre new epic movie about a visionary architect has been panned by critics. Will Wiles asks what it all says about the profession's role within contemporary popular culture.

One of the characters in Charlie Kaufman's 2008 film Synecdoche New York lives in a house that's on fire. It's on fire when they buy it, and the fire continues for years. Eventually it has tragic consequences.

The metaphor is not particularly subtle. But that image of the burning house, the idea of it, is very powerful. It gets under the skin and stays there, and a decade and a half later it's still smouldering away. It occurred to me again after watching Francis Ford Coppola's bizarre new epic Megalopolis.

Megalopolis has already been hatcheted down to a spreadable paste by reviewers

Megalopolis is full of striking imagery. In one instance we see the beleaguered mayor of New Rome, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), sitting at his desk as it sinks sideways into shifting sands. It's a very beautiful shot, with a sort of psychotropic effulgence that's used throughout the film.

Again, the metaphor is not subtle – it doesn't need to be. But it doesn't disturb, it doesn't get under the skin. There's no mystery in it. It's more like the visual gags in a Zucker Abrahams Zucker movie.

Megalopolis is filled with such blunt images. While its hero, architect Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), is unjustly persecuted in the courts, a giant statue of Lady Justice slumps miserably in the street.

Catalina has the ability to stop time, and so he stands on a giant clock face. It's often quite arresting, but Michael Bay's Transformers movies are often quite arresting.

I'm not here to kick a movie when it's down, and Megalopolis has already been hatcheted down to a spreadable paste by reviewers. Nor am I here to try and redeem it, although its chaotic, dreadful spate carries much of interest past the cinema-goer.

But this is a film about architecture. And when a film as cumbersome with meaning and fatally earnest as Megalopolis uses architecture to make its point, what is it saying?

That deathly AI sheen clings to Catalina's proposed ideal city

Driver's Catalina is chairman of the Design Authority of New Rome, Coppola's fabulised New York. Besides being a visionary architect, he has the aforementioned ability to halt time, which he uses to freeze controlled demolitions and to almost throw himself off the Chrysler Building, but not quite. Not much other use is made of it; it functions more as a token of his overall specialness.

Catalina has invented a miracle material called Megalon. Megalon is the basis of Catalina's proposed Megalopolis, a utopian city that will supplant New Rome. In this, he is opposed by the hidebound Mayor Cicero, and is conspired against by his cousin Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf); he is redeemed by Cicero's daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel).

This summary doesn't capture the disjointed way in which Megalopolis proceeds. It is a series of artful – sometimes beautiful – non sequiturs, which are given a dream-like quality by the frequent use of trippy golden hour light.

The dialogue is stiff and stagey. It's like a perfume advert that lasts for two hours and eighteen minutes. AI might not have been used in its production, but it feels like a harbinger of AI films: glossy, slippery, incoherent, faintly disturbing; a gumbo of recognisable fragments; visually startling moment by moment, but incomprehensible as a whole.

And that deathly AI sheen clings to Catalina's proposed ideal city. The architectural utopia that Megalopolis depicts is vague. Megalon is a shimmering, translucent, amber material and the structures it creates are luminous biomorphic towers.

It resembles the oodles of speculative architectural vapourware that proliferate online. Tendrils of Megalon snake their way around the existing structures of New Rome, as if Megalopolis is growing like wisteria. Neri Oxman was architecture and design consultant for the film and her influence can perhaps be seen in this organicism.

It is telling that Coppola first conceived of Megalopolis in the latter half of the 1970s

We can infer very little about what goes on in these blob-trees. Residential? Commercial? Utopian permanent leisure? Processing human beings into a nutritious slurry? Form flummoxes function.

The one interior we see has a diaphanous, edgeless feel, like the setting of a dream. "Deceptively spacious," an estate agent might say, while the potential buyer wonders where they will plug in the Dyson. Anywhere, I suppose, or maybe it won't be needed, given the generous magical properties of Megalon. The room is, however, a fairly normal kitchen-diner.

On the level of urbanism, we don't get much more. Megalopolis has moving walkways – pulsing and glistening, of course – which will transport you to a park in mere minutes. This is futurism at its most quaint, a Norman Bel Geddes, World's Fair techno-fix.

We get a couple of glimpses of a sort of autonomous-pod transit system, another perennial favourite for visionary urbanisers. Paul Rudolph proposed something similar in the megastructure he designed to cover Robert Moses's unbuilt Lower Manhattan Expressway.

Which raises the question of whether Catalina is more idealistic Rudolph or imperialist Moses. There's no doubt that Megalopolis will be fantastically destructive to New Rome, although Catalina naturally regards that as a price worth paying, and Cicero's resistance is painted as decadent and staid. "Don't let the now destroy the forever!" Catalina demands of the mayor in an early scene.

Also early on, we see him demolishing a large expanse of grim apartment buildings. Again, this is an oddly old-fashioned mindset, a mid-20th-century modernist fantasy of clean slates and fresh starts. It is telling that Coppola first conceived of Megalopolis in the latter half of the 1970s, when these post-war dreams of comprehensive reconstruction had spalled into disillusion.

On left and right, architectural dreams are more prosaic now

The probing tendrils of Megalopolis hint that it might have more insidious ways of spreading itself, but ultimately these questions of creative destruction are solved with the convenient crash-landing of a satellite, which craters the necessary site.

There's no time to be squeamish about this. The rather approximate nature of Catalina's vision is beside the point. Utopias aren't meant to offer solutions, we're told, but to ask the right questions. The point is that Catalina is a visionary, a genius, able to pierce the faded consensus of his age and see further, which is why he spends a lot of time at the top of things and looking through telescopes.

This is two Ayn Rand heroes for the price of one: Howard Roark, the uncompromising architect in The Fountainhead, and Hank Rearden, the millionaire inventor of "Rearden Metal" in Atlas Shrugged. As a hymn to innovation and individualism, and against democratic restraint, Megalopolis might find fans in Silicon Valley. No tragic flaws mar this ideal man, apart from occasional picturesque brooding.

It's all quite heady – a throwback, no doubt, but also a reminder that the heroic conception of the architect is an intoxicating one. The visionary architect, in culture at least, combines radical features of politician, social reformer, engineer and artist. They are the crackling fusion of "right brain" and "left brain": the dreamers and mystics who are also practical men and women of action.

No other profession reaches all the same parts. The sometimes-clumsy urban experiments of the 20th century, and the tailing-off of the spectacular architecture of the early 21st, have soured the public architect-hero somewhat. On left and right, architectural dreams are more prosaic now. But the wrecking-ball visionary remains irresistible. They'll be back.

Will Wiles is a design writer and the author of four novels, most recently The Last Blade Priest.

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