"Better than Disneyland"

Rating: 8/10 (14 February 2011)

There were a lot of movies made about the Vietnam war in the fifteen years or so following its end. They varied considerably in their approach, but one thing they all had in common was an attempt to understand and come to terms with what was surely the most unpopular and widely condemned war of the 20th century. Apocalypse Now tries to explain the war in abstract terms, as part calculated slaughter and part incompetent chaos, part Mad Max and part Lord of the Flies, and presents its story in the form of a surreal, operatic nightmare.
Although Apocalypse Now's in-the-field production notoriously became an almighty cinematic endeavour, at its heart is a classy screenplay by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola that has two totally perfect aspects to it. The first is its perfect pacing, designed for a tense and exciting and carefully controlled build-up to a finale. The first half hour or so deals with a no-holds-barred depiction of the brutal realities of warfare. From here on situations become increasingly bizarre and removed from reality – a descent into a surrealist maelstrom. The little revelations about Colonel Kurtz's past are interspersed throughout the picture, feeding us this fascinating man's story one titbit at a time. The second aspect is its perfect dialogue, most of which was presumably provided by Milius, the acknowledged master of such. Milius has the true touch of the poet, creating dialogue that, with just a few teasing words, conjures up images more vivid than a whole paragraph of description - "Every minute Charlie squats in the bushes"; "He was wrapped too tight for Vietnam"; "I realised, like I was shot with a diamond bullet". Notice the unusual choice of words that just makes a sentence that little bit more characteristic. For example, instead of "the walls moved in a little closer", we get "the walls moved in a little tighter". Unconventional, a little less logical, but far more evocative.
As a director Francis Ford Coppola has the difficult task of giving the movie its strange and stylised tone without making it too obviously "filmmaker-ish". There is a clear attempt here to maximise the viewer's sense of immersion by avoiding any reminders of cinematic artifice, right down to dispensing with end credits. However in order to give the picture the rhythmic, dreamlike quality it requires there are occasional odd manoeuvres, such as panning over to the white curtain at the end of the briefing scene, but this sort of thing is never obtrusive because the stylisation of Apocalypse Now is all of a piece. Camera movement is slow, smooth and repetitive, with frequent use of horizontal tracking shots such as the one with which the picture opens. What's more, a lot of the odd look of Apocalypse Now is within the scene, not in what the camera does. The early scenes like the massacre at the village are filled with surreal but plausible images such as the coloured smoke bombs or a cow being airlifted. Towards the end of the movie, characters' movements become eerie and dance-like, the lighting becomes more stark and the sound design more ominous. A lot of the credit also goes to cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and editor Walter Murch for completing the finished look.
But there is a problem in Apocalypse Now's precision and stylisation. The build-up to the crew's arrival at Kurtz's compound is so effective, so promising, that the actual finale becomes a bit of a letdown. And by this point, the creeping weirdness of the picture is verging on the tedious. And while Marlon Brando's Kurtz is an awesome presence worthy of the character, Dennis Hopper's annoyingly hammy and formulaic madman act is too little too late. The lack of a sympathetic protagonist also makes for somewhat unrewarding viewing. Apocalypse Now is a grandly ambitious movie, a noble envisaging of the Vietnam war as a hallucinatory horror, but in its perfection of style it lacks a little heart and soul.