Baring of the human soul

Rating: 10/10 (11 August 2005)

What can I say about this film is that it's simply one of the best ever. Francis Ford Coppola shows us the deepest emptiness of the human soul that the ruins of war mean. If you have read Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", the book in which the movie's concept is based, you will understand the parallelism between the original and the Marlon Brando's Kurtz, the character who symbolizes the greatest and the lowest of the human being.
I want to write a meaningful comment, that's because I'm going to talk about the metaphysical part of this movie. There is a lot of comments talking about the movie itself, so read them if you are looking for that.
Apocalypse Now is a war movie that encloses a deeper story; the journey of a man who is caught between war and peace, death and life, and doesn't find any meaning for both of them. When his superiors task him an extra-official mission, he is involved in the chase of a ghost, a man who is apparently mad but whose actions in the current war seem to be brilliant. Captain Benjamin L. Willard finds himself chasing a man who admires in order to kill him, although he doesn't know what he will do when he faces Kurtz. In his path Willard have to confront the horrors of war, which degenerate forth to complete madness, nonsense and death like the most terrible nightmare.
The rest is history. I think that the Redux version adds darkness and daze to the original Apocalypse Now, deepening more in its real meaning; not only an anti-war movie but the baring of the human soul.