The revered ’70s Golden Age filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola is 85 years old and was, until quite recently, consumed by a never-finished passion project. After decades of stalling and delays, Coppola poured $120 million of his own money into making Megalopolis, a retrofuturist/sci-fi/noir drama of industry which reimagines New York City as the center of a new kind of ancient Rome. Coppola’s ambition is admirable, as is his dogged commitment to getting something made on his own terms.

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So I don’t exactly relish in reporting that Megalopolis, the for-now final result of all that thought and work, is a near unmitigated disaster. I traveled to the Cannes Film Festival (where the film premiered on May 16) with hope, wishing against wish that Coppola just might pull it off and prove all the doubters and naysayers wrong. Forget those crummy reports from industry screenings in Los Angeles last month; perhaps the real cinephiles at Cannes would understand the film, would embrace Coppola’s grand, mad vision.

Maybe some of them will indeed see value in what Coppola has made. Many more, though, will scratch their heads in utter disbelief. Megalopolis is a choppy ramble of a movie, stuffed with poorly elucidated ideas. It’s as if someone has spent $120 million—more money than most Americans make in a year!—to film the chicken scratch scrawls of a notebook, hastily staged with actors and garish green-screen effects. It is, I’m afraid, tedious nonsense.

Adam Driver, in a fitting haircut, plays Cesar Catalina, a genius city planner who holds remarkable political sway—perhaps more so than even the mayor of New Rome, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). The two are at odds—much like the real Catiline and Cicero—as the city struggles to gather around a collective dream for its future. Cicero is practical and shortsighted, while Catalina campaigns for a utopia he believes will be made possible by a mysterious invention called Megalon. No, not the monster that Godzilla fought once; Megalon is an adaptive material that can, essentially, create buildings that evolve and grow with the people who inhabit them. At least, that’s what I was barely able to grok from my one viewing of the film.

As Cicero and Catalina duke it out in a war of words and policy, other forces are conspiring to make their own runs at the throne. There is Catalina’s cousin, Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), who is the grandson of Crassus (Jon Voight), an immensely wealthy banker. Clodio is a laughing stock party boy rumored to be sleeping with his own sisters, but is dangerously clever for a degenerate ne’er-do-well. Further complicating matters is the improbably named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), who hosts a finance news TV show and is having an affair with Catalina. Meanwhile, the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), is cozying up to Catalina, drawn to his whirring mind and brooding intrigue.

On and on Coppola unspools these threads, yanking this way and that as he struggles toward meaning. At one turn it seems that Megalopolis will be about Julia investigating the mysterious death of Catalina’s wife. Then the movie turns to focus on Platinum and her machinations. There is a bizarre digression into a scandal involving a pop star, Vesta (Grace VanderWaal), who is celebrated for her virginity. (That last bit all unfolds during a gladiatorial circus event put on for a wedding—at Madison Square Garden.)

If any of this sounds interesting, I assure you it is not. Coppola’s dull but voluble script says very little, or at least very little that can be cogently deciphered. The film plays as if the entire thing was rewritten after the actors had shot their parts and gone home. Nothing—no reaction shot, no transition between scenes—seems to sync, leaving the performances completely at sea. Driver, whose natural charisma complements Coppola’s faux-classical tone, manages some gravity here and there, but few others fare as well. Plaza lays it on thick in all the wrong color palette; LaBeouf hams it up, maybe just to have something to do on set. Poor Emmanuel, stilted and drab, suffers the worst, though her flat line reading is probably not really her fault; Julia is a woman-shaped void meant only to gaze up in wonder at Catalina’s brilliance so that we in the audience might too. (She also, of course, bears his child, who represents the future of all of us.)

Women occupy a grim place in Megalopolis. They mostly exist to encourage or thwart the genius and power of men, the masters of the universe to whom Megalopolis plays strange fealty. Those men are not brought to ruin, as the beginning of the film suggests they will be; Megalopolis ends instead with a celebration of benevolent oligarchy, entrusting the future of humanity to a rich ubermensch who has the technology to lead us to the promised land. Perhaps Coppola has spent entirely too much time in Northern California.

That being said, Megalopolis is too confused a film to make a truly odious or dangerous point. (Though the ending of the Vesta plotline is somewhat alarming.) This is the junkiest of junk-drawer movies, a slapped together hash of Coppola’s many disparate inspirations.

What really tanks the movie, though, is its datedness, the inescapable feeling that this was all dusted off after 30 years and given very few updates. Only a few computers are glimpsed in the movie, and there is zero reference to cell phones or the internet; the people of New Rome mostly get their news from the papers. But the film’s true out-of-time quality lies in sneakily chauvinist posturing that poses as humanism, the Great Man theorizing that might has well have been beamed in from the Aspen Ideas Festival had that accursed event existed in 1972. The film’s political frame of reference, as much as it has any frame of reference at all, is woefully inapt for our times. Audiences—and Coppola, for all the trouble he went through—would be better off if he had opted not to say anything at all.