The greatest film ever made about war and insanity

Rating: 10/10 (25 January 2017)

I've watched Apocalypse Now multiple times since I first saw it, and it gets better and better each time. Every time I take something new from it. It is a masterpiece, certainly the greatest war film ever made and certainly one of the greatest films ever made regardless of genre. Apocalypse Now shows the human condition pushed to the limit in times of war, excellently adapting the classic novel "Heart Of Darkness" and giving it a new setting of the Vietnam War as a way of showing the slippery slope into darkness and insanity that could happen to any of us.
The film pushes the limits when it comes to showing just how insane everyone was in Vietnam, reflected not only in Robert Duvall's insane Colonel Bill Kilgore and Marlon Brando's deliciously insane and poetic Colonel Kurtz but in the journey undertaken by Captain Willard and his men across the river, which geniusly represents their slide into insanity and doom the closer they get to their goal.
Heart Of Darkness was the perfect novel for Coppola to adapt in order to show the horrors of Vietnam, as everything from Kurtz' attitude to the war and the hypocrisy of leaders and the true horrors of war itself are perfectly reflected with the Vietnam war, a war which Coppola felt was "Heart Of Darkness coming true" The film has one classic sequence after another to add to its legacy: The opening montage set to "This Is The End" by The Doors, The exhilarating and shocking "Ride Of The Valkyries" Helicopter attack, Kilgore's iconic, passionate and disturbing speech about how he sees the war, the mind-numbingly depressing riverboat sequence, "Do you know who is in charge here?", the deaths of each of the major characters the further they go, the arrival at the camp, the thought provoking conversations between Willard and Kurtz, "The Horror....The Horror" and of course the haunting final shots before everything fades to black.
We all know the hell Coppola himself went through in getting this film made through a protracted and stressful production littered with problems from drug use to Marlon Brando's attitude to the problems with the military equipment they'd rented, but it was all worth it in the end.
Apocalypse Now is more than just a great war movie that shows the horrors of war. It is also a movie that exposes the true depths of the darkness that lays inside all of us.
One of the greatest films ever made.