My greatest movie experience!

Rating: 10/10 (12 January 2008)

Diane and I watched this movie last night many years after our first viewing when it was initially released and we both were almost incredulous at the complexity, power and brilliance of the movie. I had thought that Deer Hunter was the most important and powerful movie to originate from the Vietnam War but after last night I realise that I was badly mistaken. In a way I did not understand that it was possible to make a movie as powerful as Apocalypse Now; I did not realise that one person could assemble the actors and the script and select the camera shots that could produce what we watched last night.
Beyond the superb movie making, there is the consideration about the film's alleged anti-Americanism because of the surreal overview of the war. Personally, from my reading and absorption of war visuals, I found the movie all too real. Of course Coppolla exaggerated, massively, but this exaggeration was based on the truth of this extraordinarily nasty war. As crazy as he made events look, read a book called "Bloods-An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans" and I am sure you will finish it thinking that Apocalypse Now was almost a fairy tale. Maybe many veterans do not want to admit to themselves the horrors that America inflicted on an innocent people but it did happen.
I am not a complete neophyte with cinema although I do confess to a huge lack regarding the technicalities and subtleties of the movie making process; however, after having said this even I was amazed at the quality of each individual scene which, under a lesser hand, could have constituted an entire movie project on its own. The brilliance of the scene of Duval's village attack, the French dinner party and the final cataclysm with Kurtz each of which has total standalone brilliance is beyond us mere humans to appreciate.
Is it the century's best?