Very artistic war movie. What's the point?

Rating: 4/10 (19 January 2013)

I'm a middle aged, suburban bread, ordinary guy. Until yesterday I'd never seen Apocalypse Now. That makes me VERY UNORDINARY!
I count many war movies among my favorites including Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down and Band of Brothers and I really liked first two Godfather movies but somehow, I'd never seen Coppola's iconic Vietnam war movie. That makes me uniquely qualified (in my mind) to share my experience. Here goes:
Stories have been told and movies made about the difficulty of making this movie. The lead actor was dumped, the script was trashed, the cast and crew was stoned and the director didn't know how to end the movie. It shows! The story is very uncomplicated, Captain Willad (Sheen), a grizzled military assassin is ordered to track down a rogue colonel (Brando) in the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia.
But really, this is an art movie! It is clear that Coppola wanted to show off his skills behind the camera. The entire film is an incredible contrast of color and darkness. Each and every scene is a piece of visual art and it's very distracting. It totally removes any sense of realism. It's the definition of "theatrical." Even more distracting is the non-stop synthesized 70's era soundtrack.
The lack of a script is obvious in almost every scene. I'd imagine 90 percent of Sheen's EXTENSIVE voice over work was added during the editing process in an attempt to pull the disjointed story together. In the end, the one and only story line was resolved (as foreshadowed a dozen times) and the screen faded to black.
This movie was probably a fraud dressed up like art in 1979. In 2013 it's just disappointing and dated!