The last masterpiece of Francis Ford Coppola

Rating: 7/10 (30 December 2019)

"Apocalypse now" is a film with a great reputation and a big influence. Many people know the sentence "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" without ever having seen the film. This reputation is partly due to the production history (a hell in itself) and the financing (Coppola financed the film himself and put the entire capital he had earned with the "Godfather" films at stake). A diffucult production history however does not make in itself a good film.
"Apocalypse now" has many facets, but in my opinion this is more a weakness then a strength of the movie.
As a Vietnam movie it is (in my opinion) surpassed by "The deer hunter" (1978, Michael Cimino).
You may object that "Apocalypse now" is not a pure Vietnam film and that the book on which it is based ("Heart of darkness", 1899, Joseph Conrad) is situated in Africa. True, "Apocalypse now" is also an odyssey with a river as a metaphor, but also in this category I can think of a better movie ("The night of the hunter", 1955, Charles Laughton). Well done is the cinematography of Vittorio Storaro who makes the movie darker when it progresses.
In the third place the movie is about sinking into madness, but in this respect I can refer to a film like "Aguire, der Zorn Gottes" (1972, Werner Herzog). By the way some characters are already very mad at the beginning of the fim (e.g. colonel Kilgore), it only makes one more curious after the madness of colonel Kurz and if this is the only reason why the US army is so interested in him?
Last but not least the film is about pagan religion. At the end of the film the book "The golden bough, a study in magic and religion" (1890, J.G. Frazer) appears briefly on the screen. In this facet the movie outperforms a movie like "The wicker man" (1973, Robin Hardy), but that is not a very hard thing to do. Regarding this respect I admired the brilliant close ups of the face of Marlon Brando very much. It was a bit of a disappointment to learn that one of the functions of these close ups was to keep his big belly of the screen.
Above I criticized the film as a whole. The film however contains a couple of scenes that are indeed brilliant. Below I shall mention the scenes that striked me the most. "Apocalypse now" has been released in three different versions (Original (1979), Redux (2001) and Final cut (2019)). This was possible because Coppola (as mentioned earlier) had financed the film himself, and was thus owner of the copyrights. Not al the critical scenes appear in all versions.

The most well known scene is without any doubt the helicopter-attack on the Vietnamese village with the "Ride of the Walkure" music. The fact that Walkures take dead war heroes to Walhalla but do not kill them theselves makes the scene no less effective. "Apocalypse now" is also the film (together with the popsong "Good night Saigon" from Billy Joel) that makes the association between helicopters and the Vietnam war the most explicit (also "The Doors" are mentioned in both film and song). What amazes me the most in this scene is that it really is beautiful when one sees the helicopters take off. The horror strikes only when the camera cuts to a Vietnamese schoolyard with playing children.

Also worth mentioning is the scene where all of the inhabitants of a Sampan are killed, just because a 17 years old American boy from the Bronx (that we have come to know as rather sympathetic) loses control of his nerves.

A second scene with the playmates was introduced in the redux version and again skipped in the final cut. The reason was that it would be too woman unfriendly, which is true. The remaining scene with the playmates is really revealing. Isn't it male unfriendly to sexually arouse adolescent boys so much that they forget that they are only cannon feed?

The final scene I would like to draw your attention to is the scene on the French plantation (only in the redux and final cut). Some find this scene to slow, others interpret the French inhabitants of the plantation as ghosts but I would like to draw your intention to the following quote of the French padre familias (ghost or human):

"We want to stay here because it's ours - it belongs to us. It keeps our family together. I mean, we fought for that. While you Americans... you are fighting for the biggest nothing in history!"
In Vietnam the Americans confused a north-south conflict for an east - west coflict. They fought for the biggest nothing indeed.