Rain of Madness

Rating: 10/10 (19 December 2009)

Apocalypse Now is a nosedive into madness, both literally and metaphorically. A film made with sheer egoism, but in the spirit of uncompromising art.
We know that this film arose out of the director's attempt to adapt the modernist novella Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. We also know that Mr. Coppola actually went to the Phillipines to shoot this film, that too just after the war had ended, and that the film was very nearly not made at all, because of immense production hassles which might have seemed obvious to a more sober (and less successful) director.
Being well acquainted with the novella, I can confidently say that the film version is NOT successful at articulating the ideas of the original work. Some of the dialog in the film - the briefing given to Willard, the photographer's rants, Kurtz's last lines - seem to be simply lifted from the novella and pasted onto the film, without any proper explanation or context. No Country For Old Men is a film adaptation of a book that is obstinately true to its source, articulates its ideas correctly, and also stands independently from the novel as a film on its own. If we didn't know the source for Apocalypse Now, there would be no way to make sense of the climax. Definitely not. In fact, the film is anticlimactic - the first two thirds are a surreal tour-de-force of visuals, sound and fury ; the last third is a disappointing damp squib.
I would say that this film demonstrates the limitations of cinema. In a play or a novel, the writer has all the freedom to conjure up whatever he likes, and it is all upto him, it is as he wills. Whereas a film relies on the co-operation of literally hundreds of artists and technicians, and rarely does the director, producer or writer have complete authority over the final product. For instance, everyone knows how Marlon Brando behaved on this project, and the climax' failure is more his fault than the director's - the film was doing fine precisely till Mr. Brando shows up. Also, literature has far more freedom of technique - for example, Heart of Darkness relies heavily on ambiguity to play up the readers' perception of Kurtz and his life - while film-making often has no comparable equal to many of these techniques.
The film is a must-see, however. Forgive me, thats putting it way too lightly. What it lacks in consistency and coherence, it more than makes up for in sheer visual and technical virtuosity. In an age when there was no CGI, no sophisticated camera rigs and steadicams, and no optical FX, Mr. Coppola and master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro conjured up a surreal montage of imagery that leaves one breathless, and nearly appalled in fact. The film seems to shuffle colors, textures, tones, light and shadow like a pack of cards. In particular there are two sequences - Willard's first encounter with the Air Cav, and the chopper assault on the village - that are more surreal than anything made by Kubrick or Fritz Lang or anybody. A chopper airlifting a bull for a meat roast, the choppers taking off and approaching the village with Kilgore kicking off Wagner at full blast, "Hi tiger, bye tiger !", the playboy bunnies' lap dance, colored smoke grenades, the flare attack, the ghostlike bedlam at the final bridge - these images indelibly stab your memory.
The additional footage in the REDUX version doesn't really add anything more to the original version, by way of greater insight or substance. The French plantation sequence has one comment on the Vietnam war that would not have been allowed back in 1979, had the US government had its way. For instance, Black Hawk Down was made entirely with US military support. Which is to say that the Pentagon suitably airbrushed the script, completely throwing out the Somali perspective (which the book included) and portraying the Somalis as the bad guys and the American troops (surprise surprise) as the good guys.
In short, far from perfect, but perfectly insane, and also perfectly unavoidable.