Apocalypse Now

Francis Ford Coppola, once the most praised and powerful director in Hollywood, entered the Southeast Asian jungle to make a movie. Armed with Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", a small army of technicians, and a 15 million dollar budget, he emerged ten months later with thousands of hours of footage, two nearly dead actors and a nervous breakdown.

The cause of all this personal trauma was "Apocalypse Now", a film in which Martin Sheen is sent up a river and into the jungles of Vietnam to find Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a Special Forces officer who has gone insane.

Conrad's message was that savagery and apathy can wipe out the fragile gains of civilization within a single generation. A thin line stands between civilization and total collapse. Inject a little bit of barbarism, a little bit of chaos, and everything falls apart. Coppola's film tries to build on this, and states that America's inability to relinquish the trappings of civilization (ie- to get out of the boat), ensured its defeat. We lost because we weren't, as a nation, prepared to commit genocide. We committed horrors, but we weren't prepared to go all the way.

The biggest problem with "Apocalypse Now" is that it was written by John Milius, the pro-war, gun toting ultra conservative whom the Coen Brother's based their character Walter Sobchak (from "The Big Lebowski") on. At the end of Milius' script, Kurtz and Willard team up to fight America. They represent the warrior savage, free from hypocrisy but lost in the darkness.

Coppola, of course, found Milius' script largely silly. He removed Milius' violent ending and went in search of something more powerful. For some grand statement on war and human nature. But he found none. How could he? You can't paddle down a straight line for 10 months and then suddenly expect to reach a new destination.

Throughout the film, "Apocalypse Now" tells us one thing, but shows us something else. The Colonel Kilgores of the picture actually fight the war, whilst the powerful warrior God, Col Kurtz, does little beside chopping the limbs off natives or hiding in the shadows. Milius' script saw Kurtz as the hero. A wise and seasoned rebel warrior who sticks his fingers up to the hypocritical veneer of civilization, but Coppola seems unwilling to go down that route.

Coppola's "redux" cut of the film, though badly paced, is more interesting. It adds a French plantation scene which attempts to contrast the French period of colonial rule with America's war in Vietnam. The problem with this is that US involvement in Vietnam and the Colonial mindset of nineteenth century Europe, as seen in "Heart of Darkness", are completely different. American policy wasn't inspired by colonial aims but by ideological ones. The American experience in Vietnam was the opposite of Conrad's colonial experience. No wonder Coppola couldn't find a suitable ending. There isn't one.

Late in the film, Kurtz accuses his country of hypocrisy. They are unwilling to fully embrace the darkness. If he were given a small army of savages, he says, then the war would be over tomorrow. The implication is that the Vietnamese were nothing more than barbaric savages who should be dealt with, not civility, but primal brutality.

Worse yet, Coppola's "war" is one of gorgeous cinematography and exciting spectacle. When a Vietnamese village is raided, it feels more like the Death Star trench run than a savage massacre. Killgore himself is a figure of fun rather than the monster he should be. Milius' script painted a much darker character (hence kill and gore).

Still, "Apocalypse Now" may contain no truths about Vietnam or war in general, but it is a film absolutely dripping with passion. Like "Aguirre, the Wrath of God", "Apocalypse Now" is very much a Werner Herzog film. Herzog was a mad artist who wanted to lift a boat over a mountain. Why lift the boat over the mountain? No reason. He simply wanted to do it in the name of art!

Same thing with Coppola. He wanted to do "somthing" great. He went into the jungle, went insane and came out with a couple thousand hours of mad footage. What is the merit of this footage? The merit is in surviving the journey. In making it down the river and back out again.

And so what we have is a film about its creators. A film about the madness of the white man. The madness of the director. The madness of the crew. Ironically, the film's madness is all a result of indulgence. The indulgence of a staggering budget, studio leeway, accessible drugs, limitless resources and a giant ego. It's the shallowest kind of insanity. The insanity of unlimited power and a lack of boundaries.

8/10 - "Apocalypse Now" ultimately amounts to nothing more than a series of memorable set-pieces. These set pieces don't enrich one another or gel in any way. It's an incomplete film, and even Coppola admits that he didn't quite know what he was doing or tying to say. The film goes up the river but doesn't know why.

Far more interesting is "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse", a documentary shot in tandem with the film. As a study in ego-maniacal madness it's far more powerful than Coppola's film. Narrated by Coppola's wife, it's also very intimate and perceptive. It's also interesting to see how much Coppola relied on Brando's improvisational skills, hoping desperately that the great actor would whip up some kind of climax out of thin air. Brando, of course, was just in it for the huge pay cheque.

Though a failure, this film is worth multiple viewings.

Colonel Kurtz has disappeared within the jungle, with his troupe of fighting fiends ready to rumble, you've been tasked to take him out, but first you have to search and scout, along a river where the residents are disgruntled (to put it mildly). Lots of bloodshed, bullets, ballistics then flow, there's napalm too that conjures up a glow, many lives are lost and taken, in this hell where you're forsaken, but don't ask why - because nobody, really, knows.

Still a spectacular piece of filmmaking that demonstrates on many levels the destruction, physical and mental that armed conflict causes, and yet we perpetually fail to learn from past events.

Apocalypse Now is an interesting film, not because it is supposedly an anti-war film, but because it is surreal and shows an interesting journey into madness.

Martin Sheen gives us an insight into his character here and we see the senselessness of the whole situation and how easy it is to lose yourself in certain situations.

We follow his journey and the various events that befall him and a small group of soldiers in a patrol boat traveling deep into the jungle. On their way, really bizarre things happen.

Along the way, we also see Robert Duvall in the role of a completely insane officer, whose episodic role has a profound impact on the film.

The film should essentially be anti-war, but it didn't strike me as such, but simply as a film about the fate of various people who found themselves in unusual situations.

Their whole mission doesn't really make sense, and in the end they accomplished nothing, but that's the point. Everything was really in vain.

The direction is excellent, the music is perfectly integrated into the film and matches the tone of the film.

For me, this is a film about the loss of reason and the journey to madness. If civilization completely collapses, and somewhere it has already collapsed a long time ago, this is roughly what we can expect, madness and insanity.

I watched three versions of the film and I liked the Redux version the best.

An interesting and brutal journey into madness and darkness.

There are films we watch because they are good, even though they are painful for us. This is a film I saw one time. At that time I thought to myself, this is enough. It was painful to make that journey down the river, wondering what was around every corner. Then we meet the products of our own id impulses, as we are the enemy, our souls have been brought down to this. At the end of the river is the man who came before us, and we see the uselessness of the journey. It is the Heart of Darkness. There are death masters like Robert Duvall. There are those who can only hope to survive, but the war is the master. The Doors music as the napalm settles gently on the treetops and across the ground, sweeps us up gently. Meanwhile it is consuming the flesh of the Vietnamese people, as well as an occasional American soldier. The ancient Romans could not envision peace without war. We and much of the world seem to have embraced those tenets put forth some two thousand years ago. This film gets into the marrow.

After the success of the first two 'Godfather' films in 1972 and 1974 respectively, Francis Ford Coppola embarked on an ambitious attempt to bring home the reality of the war in Vietnam, which had concluded with the fall of Saigon to the Vietcong in 1975… The plot was loosely based on the book 'Heart of Darkness,' a story by Joseph Conrad about Kurtz, a trading company agent in the African jungle who has acquired mysterious powers over the natives…Coppola retains much of this, including such details as the severed heads outside Kurtz's headquarters and his final words, "The horror… the horror…"

In the film, Sheen plays an army captain given the mission to penetrate into Cambodia, and eliminate, with "extreme prejudice," a decorated officer who has become an embarrassment to the authorities… On his journey up the river to the renegade's camp he experiences the demoralization of the US forces, high on dope or drunk with power…

Although, as a result of cuts forced on Coppola, the film was accused of incoherence when first released, it was by the most serious attempt to get to grips with the experience of Vietnam and a victorious reinvention of the war film genre… In 1980 the film won an Oscar for Best Cinematography and Best Sound…

"Apocalypse Now" was re-released in 2001 with fifty minutes restored… As a result, the motion picture can now be seen as the epic masterpiece it is