If All War Is Hell, Then....

Rating: 10/10 (6 October 1999)

Francis Coppola's famous quote, "This is not a film ABOUT Vietnam; this film IS Vietnam", gives revealing insight into the filmmaker's intentions when making his visionary war epic, "Apocalypse Now". From that statement it is not difficult to draw parallels between the film and the war it sought to portray: both were long and costly; both began with a sense of purpose and ended with ambiguous, unsatisfying resolutions; and both displayed a surreality borne out of absurd imposed conditions that made it impossible to secure victory. This absurdity was aptly highlighted by Lt. Colonel Kilgore's self-satisfied statement, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning". It is not by accident that towards the end of the film, the mad renegade Colonel Kurtz read passages from T.S. Eliot's, "The Hollow Men". Without being specific, here a few from the poem: "Shape without form, shade without colour...Paralysed force, gesture without motion...Those who have crossed with direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom...Remember us - if at all - not as lost...Violent souls... but only as the hollow men...the stuffed men...In this last of meeting places...We grope together...And avoid speech... Gathered on this beach of the tumid river" - ("Mistah Kurtz - he dead" - 1925). "If all war is hell, then the Vietnam War was a patently absurd one" is the statement I believe Mr. Coppola attempted to make in "Apocalypse Now".