I was home alone this weekend so I decided to take a flier on Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which I’ve been curious about since it came out, though there seemed to be a universal consensus that it was terrible.

Which it is, but in a very special way. Only a true artist could create a disaster of this magnitude, a wildly ambitious epic that takes huge swings and completely misses all of them. I don’t quite have the words to describe how, just, off it is. I’m tempted to say it is Francis’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls — full of manic energy, insane plot twists, and sudden, drastic, whiplash-inducing changes in tone— but that would be unfair to BVD, which is a hundred times more fun.

The only entertaining part was watching, say, Adam Driver or Dustin Hoffman and wondering what was going through their heads when filming this thing. I can’t imagine it played any better on the page than it does on the screen; they had to know what they were signing up for; but when Coppola calls you take the part, right? Was it worth it?

In truth I found it hard to watch more than a few minutes of Megalopolis at a time, and my rental window expired with a half-hour still to go. So maybe there’s some fantastic ending that redeems it all — but I sincerely doubt it.

Perhaps it’s time for a rewatching of Apocalypse Now, especially with the recent departure of Robert Duvall. Maybe the smell of napalm will get this bad taste out of my mouth.