River revisited

Rating: 10/10 (2 September 2001)

River revisited
Apocalypse Now Redux sets a new standard among the 'Directors Cut'-versions of old classics that has continued to surface during the last decade. True, most of these versions has been better than the originals  most notably the versions of Blade Runner and The Abyss  but they have been more or less the same movie with a few changes. But when 53 minutes  roughly one third of the running time  of unknown events been added to a familiar story, we are set with a new story. Therefore it's more accurate to regard this as a new movie. And there's no doubt about it, this one is even better then the original. To be more precise, it's 53 minutes better The inserts are many, but here's a basic rundown of the major events thats new: First of all, the famous scene on the beach where the mad Colonel wipes out an entire village in order to surf there, has been extended with a clever twist: Willard and his crew steals the colonels surf-board as they sneak off with their boat. The colonel is very upset by this, and pursues them with helicopters. The tape recorder in the chopper doesn't play Wagner any more, though. Instead we hear the colonel on a taped message in which he begs them to return his surfboard to him. That's a scene that has been extended. But there are some scenes that we have never seen before at all. One is a follow-up to the scene where the Playboy Playmates drive the soldiers to a frenzy. They find them again further up in the jungle where they have been stranded, and trade diesel to sexual favours in return from them. These scenes are both observant and strong, and seem very logic as a follow up to the earlier scene. But the best new sequence is when Willard and the crew on the boat arrives to a ragged French rubber-plant in the jungle. A few bits of this has been seen before, in the documentary of the making of Apocalypse Now.
This sequence is actually one of the fundaments of the story in the movie. It's quite long, and incorporates several key lines, that are at the core of the story. 'We fight because we fight for our home, for whats been ours for seventy years', says the owner of the plantation. 'You americans, you fight for the worlds biggest nothing', he continues to Willard. There's also a short love affair between Willard and a woman at the plantation. 'Don't you understand theres two of you?' she says to Willard. 'One that loves. And one that hates.' This is one of the key elements to the movie, and adds to our understanding of how and why Willards personality changes as they travel up the river. The ending is much longer. More scenes when Willard confronts Kurtz are added. It doesn't clarify much, though. Sane reasoning and logic has still ceased to exit at the macabre and horrible place at the end of the river. And one of the reasons that I absolutely love this movie is that its narrative and structure follows the dramatic path its characters experience when they travel there.
Per Lundblad