Well Begun and Left Half Done

Rating: 5/10 (20 June 2010)

The movie opens with some painful scenes. An army captain laments about how his life is not what he wanted it to be. He sits there in his room naked, drinks, smokes, cuts himself, has almost lost his mind, and doesn't quite know what to do next. Tragedy in uniform never was this well captured.
As for the movie, tragedy in film-making was never this well accomplished. While the first half battles beautifully and successfully for your attention, the second half makes its duty to make you run away. This I hardly expected from Francis Ford Coppola.
With a running time of 202 minutes, Apocalypse Now: Redux is all about the Vietnam war and the wretched cruel havoc that sliced through every American soldier who happened to be part of the operation. While it details the slow but sure degradation of the senses of these soldiers, it weaves together the tale of a Special Forces guy tasked with a mission to assassinate another Special Forces guy who -fed up with all the bloodshed-has turned insane and wages a war of his own deep in the jungles of Cambodia.
I have no complaints about the first half. It's splendid and no matter how many superlatives you use, you just cannot do justice to its description. The visuals are stunning. There's never a moment the cameraman lost his control on his art. The battle scenes are dipped in sunsets reeking of gold that swerve all over the screen and make it a delight to watch. The beauty of the shores and backwaters of the Philippines is passed off as Vietnam and the action scenes swirl in majestic hues of green and ocean blue. The battle scenes themselves are black comedy personified: The commanding officer (Robert Duvall) bothers more about his surfing than the danger his men face. And he decides to play Wagner in the midst of the noise that missiles and machine guns orchestrate.
Coppola scripts and captures a truly fearful ambiance as the search unit makes it way down or up the river and the thrills are thrown in with just the right pace. But once the thrills are done with and the monologue starts off, inevitably, the film drags itself to the bottom of the river and mumbles to itself.
This is the veritable second half in which begins the deterioration.
The whole enterprise thereafter seems to have been shot on whims and fancies that ultimately decided to head nowhere. Even as the search party does reach its destination, you can sense the director doesn't quite know how to tie up his portmanteau and say goodbye.
So he dilly dallies. He throws in decapitated bodies, severed heads, mumbo-jumbo about the Vietnam war - all passed off as excuses why the rogue became a rogue after all. There was no need for an explanation, really. The agonies the army went through were established earlier on in the movie. So Marlon Brando repeating it all while the cameraman adds touches of arty cinema is quite irritating to watch.
I think Coppola got carried away - and it's easy for the artistic to fall for that - and ultimately was so in love with whatever he shot, he did not want to do away with anything. Either that or he shot the movie when he was high. In fact, I think Brando was on weed himself.
He's horrible as the alleged insane rogue. Apparently, he had put on weight and so, he's forever in the shadows. So you see none of the physical enigma that he is famous for. Worse is the fact that he doesn't look mean and doesn't even scare you - his love for decapitated bodies and severed heads notwithstanding. Brando is deadpan - almost like wood.
The aura that Coppola draws around Brando's character giggles and vanishes in thin air as Brando himself makes it to the screen. There's no command, no hint of power, scarcely a mean look, and he looks quite uninterested in making an effort to do his job. Let's say he chose to be a lump of meat embroidered with acres of fat and thought his name will shoot down all criticism of his act.
Harrison Ford is wasted in a two-minute role that could have been easily edited out. Why he allowed himself into this venture I have no clue. Perhaps the star cast attracted him into the venture, or maybe it was the money. Whatever it was, the role he landed needed skills that could have come with any Dick, Tom, or Harrylina!
A young Laurence Fishburne makes quite an impression as a 17-year old sailor and Martin Sheen's expressions make you feel the angst and depression his character toys with every second of the movie.
The soundtrack is in synch with the scenes and The Doors have been used extensively in the finale. However, the end comes as if it's served as a complimentary side dish to placate your annoyance with the entire course. And so you end up appreciating neither the music nor the scenes woven around it for you just want to finish your meal before you fall asleep.
All said and done, the movie brings out the tragedy of Vietnam with a flair necessary for such a saga. All the frustration is well filmed and the idiocy of the generals in charge makes for some nice black comedy. If only Coppola had to stick to subtlety as he did in the first half and not let himself get dragged into a rather Bollywoodish explosion of drama, Apocalypse now: Redux would not have limped in dreadful slow motion to the finishing line.