A staggering piece of filmaking in all aspects.

Rating: 9/10 (2 September 2002)

In 1902 Joseph Conrad wrote a story based on his own experiences called 'Heart of Darkness', which is about a steamboat captain travelling up the Congo. The captain witnesses the appalling effects of Belgian imperialism on the Africans as he slowly moves deeper and deeper into the jungle, where he will meet Kurtz, a formerly brilliant Belgian agent who has gone mad. It is a story of civilisation and savagery, and it is one of the great works of English literature.
In 1979 Francis Ford Coppola released 'Apocalypse Now', a movie based on Conrad's tale but about a different form of colonisation. Set during the Vietnam War, it is the story of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) who travels upriver with a boat of mostly young soldiers on an assignment to 'terminate the command' of Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a formerly brilliant special forces officer who has gone rogue. For all their hardware, for all their awesome technologies of death, the Americans are losing the war because they simply will not go as far, will not give as much as the Viet Cong. Nor can they win over the Vietnamese people, because they do not really care about them. They are tools, a means of stopping Communism from spreading to somewhere really important, and they are treated as such. Kurtz has decided to change this: he is leading a cult who will do anything to win. Anything.
The version that I have seen is a new, longer cut called 'Apocalypse Now Redux'. I have not seen the original so I cannot say if it is an improvement, but what can say is that Redux is a masterpiece. It is the best war movie I have seen: it shows modern battle in both its awful glory and its muddy, bloody wretchedness. The sun sets, golden behind dark trees, the jungle explodes in flames, choppers whir in and out of earshot, bullets zip out of the foliage, men and women lose their minds and lives. It shows, in a series of lurid scenes, what the war, the jungle and the heat have brought out in the men: their brutality, their casual race and sexism, the crumbling of their humanity. Though it seems pompous to say so - a silly feeling, as like all art movies can be more than just entertainment - this is a profound film.
However it could have been better. I could have done without the manic and rather irritating photojournalist played by Dennis Hopper: what he tells us about Kurtz could have been shown to us directly, or been spoken by the man himself. There is also a sequence set on a French plantation that was added by Coppola. The soldiers have a break from the war, bury a dead comrade, over dinner there is a discussion about the war in a wider context, and Willard has a romantic encounter with a lonely French woman. In itself it these are good scenes, but they breaks up the momentum of the movie. As the soldiers have been going deeper into the heart of darkness, facing horrors that have gotten more and more intense, this relatively peaceful episode dissipates some of the tension that has built up. It also lengthens what is already a very long movie.
That aside, in the blackness of a movie theatre, with the screen taking up my whole field of vision, the sound of The Doors' eerie 'This Is The End' filling my ears, from the beginning of the movie to the end I was riveted to my seat. There is a famous scene where choppers come out of the blue horizon, Wagner's 'Ride Of The Valkyries' thundering from their speakers, and rain death apon a village where the terrified Vietnamese scurry like insects. It is terrible and beautiful, grotesque and exhilarating. It is like reading Revelations. It may be what the Apocalypse feels like.
9 1/2 / 10