One of the most ambitious movies of the 70s

Rating: 9/10 (14 February 2011)

Apocalypse Now is one of those movies on which few critics agree. It was extremely ambitious, and what you think of it really comes down to what you thought those ambitions were and whether you thought they were met. The original theatrical version had a couple of scenes missing, a scene with a French family at a plantation and scene where the boat catches up to the Playboy girls a second time at a fuel dump. The studio wanted them cut because the movie was running long, but without them you get a feeling that some story threads are left hanging. The director's cut is more structurally coherent and more fully explored thematically, but also longer and a bit draggy. The shorter version feels a bit more episodic and disjointed, which critics who disliked it when they saw it in the 70s seized on as a major flaw, but it really wasn't. Simply a shortcoming of rather grand ambitions.
In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a guy goes upriver in Africa to find a white jungle trader, now sick. The corruption caused by illness parallels the corruption of the man's soul. It's a rumination on the nature of evil in men. But the movie doesn't really follow the plot of the book. The movie's other major conceptual influence was Dante's Inferno, an epic Italian poem in which the narrator is given a tour of Hell. Vietnam is presented in the movie like Dante's conception of Hell, and the illustrations of Hieronymous Bosch who created several famous paintings of Dante's vision. Nightmarish images of waste and the futility of life and wages of sin.
Images like that damaged helicopter hanging out of jungle tree are designed to resonate with the work of Dante and Bosch. It's not just a wrecked helo, it's an image of human failure and corruption. Anyway, Dante's work is episodic, as the narrator tours one area of Hell, then another with little or no connecting narrative thread. The movie is rather this way too. Then when the movie makes it to Marlon Brando's camp, it comes sharply back to Conrad's book, as Brando is Kurtz, Vietnam equivalent to the Brit trader in Heart of Darkness. Brando forces Willard to confront his ambivalence about the war. Is Kurtz himself evil, or just more in tune with an evil enterprise than they are? It's a story about war as a human activity, in which war takes on all aspects of the human experience. Exhilarating, horrifying, nightmarish, grotesque, elusive, unfair and above all illogical. Kilgore and Kurtz are clearly insane, but did the war make them that way or select them because they were that way? Willard is presented as the only rational man in an irrational situation and his inability to make sense of the experience is a key how the viewer should respond.