A Most Important Film

Rating: 10/10 (15 June 2005)

Many have made comments about the high quality of many different aspects of the film from direction, to acting, to screen writing, to cinematography, however I would like to concentrate on an aspect of the film which I have not seen discussed. Simply that it stands as a film version in the lineage of the most important of human mythic stories which extends back in time through Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"(for which it admits to being a loose adaptation), to Dante's "Inferno", to Homer's "Illiad" and "Odyssey", which make it more than a simple war movie...
The film was actually a major start to my interest in such things as the human mythic as well as any number of offshoot interests.
What I want to convey is the important use of symbolic visual imagery that Coppola gets (or perhaps even finds) in the film. Knowing that he went to the edge and fought constantly with adversity in making this film, I'm consistently amazed at the film for its mythic genius in terms of both planned and unplanned aspects. As to the latter idea, I'm drawn to the early seen where Sheen, playing one of the main characters, Willard, punches a mirror, highly symbolic, yet as I know it the scene was unplanned that way, and Sheen in fact really is quite drunk, drunk enough to destroy his own image. That the movie kicks off in this powerfully symbolic, yet unplanned way, is quite fitting in my opinion.
Other symbolic details include Willard killing of a tiger in the jungle with a machine-gun, a powerful symbol of man in his most modern placement in his battle against nature. The tiger has no chance.
One should also notice when Willard first meets Kilgore, that a cow is being airlifted from the mopping up of this battle, even as a military chaplain is performing mass. The symbolic reference is to the sacred cow and the lunar bull cult and one can make a tie with these ideas and other works of art, notably Picasso's "Guernica". Still, even in the movie this cow basically symbolically reappears as the cow slaughtered near the end of the movie.
Another detail is the appearance of Frazier's "The Golden Bough" in Kurtz's quarters, illuminated for a moment and foreshadowing the conflict which will shortly take place between Kurtz and Willard. Too, then it should be noted that Kurtz deftly ducks Willards initial strike before standing up to face, and take, the death blow.
The movie may not be perfect, but it is these things, these many fine details along with other more obviously cinematic ones, which take some time to uncover, which give the movie a mythical depth rarely attempted and almost never achieved in a major movie and which also lends to the movies rare status of rewarding repeated viewings along with research into what such symbolism might mean. For me the movie is only rivaled by "Bladerunner" in these terms, and probably has more overall power being more grounded in historical reality and thus more accessible to more people.
Those who can watch the movie with a depth of vision and with an eye to the mythical history and nature of man find the movie to return a reward that few if any movies can match.