Boys Behaving Badly

Rating: 7/10 (3 March 2019)

"Apocalypse Now" has a lot to say about colonialism and American interventionism, and some unintended statements about how the West -- white folks -- see the rest of the world. Conrad's original novella compared the darkness in men's hearts to the unknown interior of Africa, and the movie draws similar comparisons to the jungles of Southeast Asia. Both stories feature characters journeying upriver and slowly losing their civilized, Western identities.
But the stronger effect of the movie is its bold redefinition of the aesthetics of war. Older war movies showcased a different sort of martial spectacle: uniforms, discipline, and impressive formations of soldiers, tanks, and airplanes. War was a pageant choreographed to stirring marches. In those days, war was a good thing, a struggle against evil and tyranny.
In "Apocalypse Now", the soldiers are shirtless young men, smoking joints and blasting rock music as they joyride up the river, terrorizing the locals. The enemy is barely seen. War is more like an anarchic gap year: there's no authority, no structure, but plenty of intoxicants to enjoy along the way. If you're into that sort of thing, it can be a great time. Surfing, LSD, machine guns, Playboy bunnies. When Colonel Kilgore says, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," you know there's nowhere else he'd rather be.
It's this aesthetic that makes the biggest impression, much more than the anti-war or anti-colonial messages. Vietnam, according to Coppola and his screenwriters, is a place where there is no responsibility, no morality, a place where a young man can massacre an entire family with a machine-gun and get away with it. Actions don't have consequences, and when death inevitably comes it does so randomly and unpredictably. Violence is a risk you take, something you live with, but not something you really have to think about.
I don't know if that's what Coppola intended. He probably thought the sight of armed helicopters obliterating a Vietnamese village to the sound of "The Ride of the Valkyries" would be ironic and shocking, rather than exciting. To most people watching the film, it probably just looks like fun.