Getting better with age

Rating: Null/10 (17 September 2010)

I just saw the terrific documentary Hearts of Darkness, all about the making of Apocalypse Now, and it made me curious to go back and watch the movie again. It's a great film, and it plays better now than it did when I first saw it. The virtuoso Wagner scene with the helicopter attack has actually improved over time, in part because it's so startling to see a complicated, beautifully organized battle sequence that's not done with any CGI. And a lot of the things that bored me or annoyed me the first time I watched the movie now add interesting depths and detours to the film. The storyline is about as straightforward as possible: an assassin goes upriver on a mission to kill a renegade colonel. But the film keeps veering off from the mission to asides that are much more enjoyable on a second viewing: the weird interlude with the Playboy bunny performance (a great satire on all those old sugary USO shows from the past), the jungle conversation about sauces, the search of the local boat that ends in a bloodbath, the walk along the trenches around the bridge that "keeps getting built back up every night, just so the VC can tear it down again." I also found myself enjoying the Brando scenes much more than I did before. They actually follow Conrad pretty closely, both in spirit and in action, and a lot of thought has gone into them -- enough to make you realize how little thought goes into most war movies nowadays, how satisfied they are with not even bothering to ask any troubling or difficult questions. Apocalypse Now doesn't have any answers to those questions, but neither did Conrad, and the movie is actually better than the novel in one sense: Conrad, because of the era he was writing in, couldn't really show us what Kurtz meant at the end when he talked about "the horror, the horror." Apocalypse Now shows us, and does it so well that Kurtz's last words hold more meaning for us at the end of the film than they do at the end of the book.