A hugely important and hypnotic film, like a compelling nightmare from which you cannot awaken.

Rating: 10/10 (1 August 2005)

Apocalypse Now is a stunning film on many levels, and a film that reverberates long after the viewer has come away from it. Visually remarkable, thematically frightening, filled with haunting and dream-like sequences that show the horror and insanity of war in intense detail, it is a film that can be watched and re-watched endlessly without ever failing to throw up new surprises. It was greeted with huge controversy when released in 1979, and almost thirty years on remains as powerful an experience. One thing that has altered over the years is the critical reaction to Marlon Brando's performance as the renegade Colonel Kurtz. Initially, Brando's performance was heavily criticised for being impenetrable and inscrutable (it didn't help that he arrived on set overweight and unprepared), but over the years the cleverness of his interpretation of Kurtz has become more apparent. Kurtz is a man alternately psychotic and eccentric, and always dangerous, and in retrospect Brando's bizarre approach to the role captures the character's insanity quite ingeniously. Those who complain they cannot understand what Kurtz is talking about in the film's final scenes are missing the point - he is lost in his own phantasmagoria and we are not meant to understand his demented ramblings.
The story, an updated and relocated adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness, deals with an emotionally-scarred Special Services soldier, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), who is instructed to travel upriver into Cambodia on a highly dangerous mission. It seems that a once brilliant colonel, named Kurtz (Marlon Brando), has retreated into the deepest jungle and formed a private army of Montagnard warriors. Quite mad, yet totally influential, Kurtz sends his loyal followers on horrific genocide missions and lords over them like some self-appointed God. Willard's job is to find and eliminate the colonel, an unsound and embarrassing thorn in the side of the American war effort. On his perilous journey to Kurtz's lair, Willard undergoes various surreal and horrifying adventures, the most remarkable of which is a helicopter attack on an enemy village led by the deranged Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) who likes the play The Ride Of The Valkyries on loudspeakers during his airborne raids because "his boys love it..... and it scares the hell out of the gooks!"
The film was a real ordeal to make. The shoot in the Phillipines spiralled over budget and took an unprecedented length of time to complete. A typhoon destroyed much of the equipment and the sets; Sheen suffered a near-fatal heart attack despite only being in his 30s. But the decision by Coppola to make the film under such authentic conditions, with no studio filming or special effects trickery, ultimately pays off. This is war like never before seen on film. Nihilistic, horrifying, destructive, pointless, perversely exciting and shockingly brutal. The much-criticised ending, with its heavy symbolism and (pretentious?) ambiguity, has frequently been viewed as the film's main flaw. But in all honesty, was there any other way to end a film of this nature? Would a nice, neat ending in which the loose ends are tidily tied together really fit in a film which goes so far out of its way to blur conventions, morals and reality? Apocalypse Now is a masterpiece - a challenging, unflinching, thought-provoking journey into the heart of darkness which asks many disturbing questions but refuses to yield any easy answers.