Apocalypse Now

Apocalypse Now; war drama, USA / Philippines, 1979; D: Francis Ford Coppola, S: Martin Sheen, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Robert Duvall, G.D. Spradlin, Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Harrison Ford

Vietnam War. Captain Willard, a drunk and washed up officer, gets an unusual assignment to find and kill Colonel Kurtz who has gone mad and set up his own army within the jungle. Willard, together with a crew of a few soldiers, sets up to find Kurtz in a boat. Their boat swims through a river and their first encounter is with Colonel Kilgore who enjoys the "smell of napalm in the morning", sets villages on fire and entertains his soldiers with women from the USA. The captain of the boat stops a few Vietnamese clerks in a boat and kills them, they encounter a tiger and get lost in the fog. In the end, only Willard, Lance and Chef reach Kurtz' outpost alive, beyond the Do Lung Bridge. He lets his soldiers arrest them. Willard spends a few days with Kurtz and finds out he is worshiped by the local inhabitants. Willard kills him and leaves the outpost.

Antiwar film "Apocalypse Now", winner of several awards, is an overlong and pretentious achievement, but it is directed in an extremely ferocious and powerful way so that it somewhat justifies its legendary reputation, since numerous sequences will linger in the viewers' minds. The director Francis Ford Coppola is criticizing American military intervention in Vietnam in a raw and cynical way, without any compromise, mostly through a lot of surreal scenes that show the sick, delirious state of the soldiers who encounter death and pain, symbolically depicting the process of losing sanity (Colonel Kilgore bombards a village with helicopters in tune to Wagner's music, equipped with his classic quote: "I love the smell of Napalm in the morning..."; a helicopter on fire stuck on a tree; violet gas in the jungle...), but also offers a thought provoking theme about the relative morals, and his visual style is impressive, thus serving as a counterbalance to the right-wing screenplay written by John Milius, who said it was an ironic jab at Hippies and their "Nirvana Now". The extended version, "Apocalypse Now - Redux", is even better than the original version. Also, Robert Duvall is brilliant as war criminal Kilgore, who has some memorable moments (in one scene he doesn't even blink when a bomb explodes only a few feet away behind him, while everyone else around him ducks from shock–that sly situation has been copied a lot of times in many other action films; he shows respect for a wounded man who is lying down, holding his intestine in with only a pot lid). Ironically, the last 30 minutes of the radically phantasmagorical story, in which Marlon Brando's crucial character Kurtz finally shows up, is also the worst part of the movie because of his unbearable monologues and philosophical babble, since this anticlimactic ending is simply no good and feels disconnected, and not even the heavy handed allegory of villagers killing a live water buffalo helps, but it still became famous nontheless.

Grade:+++