Journey into Hell

Rating: 10/10 (11 January 2007)

Cpt Willard (Sheen), an Army assassin with serious issues, is sent up the Mekong into Laos to "terminate with extreme prejudice" US Colonel Kurtz (Brando), who has either gone native or turned genocidal. He travels by boat through devastated Vietnam, searching through Kurtz...
Apocalypse Now appears to be, on the surface at least, merely Joseph Conrad's Hearts of Darkness in the Vietnam War era, but it is so much more. It is pure chaos on film, a visceral depiction of a war that has run out of anyone's control, through which the stunned Willarde errs, encountering fascinating characters similarly disconnected from reality: the warmongering fanatic Kilgore (Duvall), who leads air raids to the sound of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries and has a napalm fetish, a crazed US reporter (Hopper, just being himself really), an entrenched family of French colonists, and many more. And at the heart of the film, at the end of the stinking river of murder and mayhem, lies Kurtz (a god-like Brando).
The making of this colossal film was long, chaotic, painful and sufficiently well chronicled in the excellent documentary "Hearts of Darkness" not to be retold in this review. Suffice to say that it is a miracle that the film survived, and even benefited from its troubled conception. The unconventional editing and Vittorio Storraro's glorious saturated photography make this feel halfway between a nightmare and an acid trip. In short, it is a journey into hell, that begins with a storm of fire and ends in the devil's den.
The most telling moment of this film is of a siege against an unseen enemy, where Willlard encounters a raving soldier and asks him who is in charge, to which the soldier shrugs: "Ain't it you?". Apocalypse Now is every civilization's nightmare: that a war justified in a distant past would degenerate so foully, that men are reduced to less than animals.
One of the best and most unsettling films of all time.