Greatest Film Ever Made?

Rating: 10/10 (7 November 2000)

Well, I happen to think so. I tend to judge films on their emotional impact and I've never seen another film that is as viscerally involving as this one. The film actually gets more disturbing after multiple viewings when you know what is coming. Then the awful events loom over you instead of sneaking up on you. The film has a flimsy plot which it derives from it's source material, Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." While it employs the structure of Willard's boat journey up a river to find Kurtz it employs it to different meaning. Conrad's novel was a deconstruction of colonialism but Coppola's subject is war. But he famously said, "My film isn't about Vietnam. It is Vietnam." Coppola's film isn't really interested in the specific politics of the Vietnam War. The extent to which it is even really a "war" film is debatable. Truffaut said it was impossible to make an anti-war film because film by it's energy tends to argue for war by making it seem exciting. This film uses that fact intentionally. The horror of war is brought home to us not by our witnessing it, but by our taking part in it. Apocalypse Now's technique is to create an anti-war film not by having us critique war from the outside, but by involving us in the actual thing itself. We are forced to confront our own heart of darkness as a result. We must look within ourselves and see how we would have reacted in the same circumstances. What is the meaning of war?, is the final question of the film. The film has come under criticism because the ending does not provide a tidy resolution for this theme. But the resolution is the arc of the entire movie. When we get to the heart of the darkness at the center of war we don't find any answer that is expressed in intellectual terms. That is the film's ultimate message: war is not a product of our intellect but of our deepest human nature, our human heart of darkness. Do you think yourself the master of your own heart of darkness? So did Kurtz...