Brilliant piece of bombastic self-indulgence that reduces the Vietnam War to a mere metaphor.

Rating: 8/10 (11 November 2004)

*Smallish Spoilers*
An "errand boy sent by grocery clerks" is sent upriver to find a gone-mad Colonel Kurtz who has split with the US army and started his own private Vietnam War.
(Crass tag-line from the official trailer - "you may have been up river, but you have never been on a journey like this!")
The gist of Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness has been plundered to tell a story about another time and another place (his book was set in Africa). The guy was dead by 1925, so presumably the slash-and-burn of his carefully worded novel was authorised via a spiritualist?
Nevertheless the book has a purpose, plot and a climax; something that the real Vietnam lacked: A war started and waged by people who knew or cared little about Asia and couldn't even tell you - in a sentence - what they hoped to achieve by waging it!
(Stopping internal Communism by military invasion is rather like trying to stop Italy being catholic at the point of a gun!)
We all know the danger of war looking like fun and AN fights it by showing that you can't - in modern battle - really trust anybody. Friend or foe. Comedian Spike Milligan once joked that he had a hard WWII because he was "shot at by both sides." Lead Martin Sheen probably can identify with this joke!
There are no scenes I actually dislike, but there is plenty that I don't understand. Famously Sheen appears out of water carrying a knife in full battle paint - but why? Because it looks clever? I also don't understand a lot of his actions anyway, especially towards the end - unless what he does is under a coverall of mental breakdown.
I would also like a bit more explanation about Colonel Kurtz (Brando) and his background. I am told the Redux version has more footage set in the jungle camp - but I have never seen it. Isn't this a classic case of cinematography taken over from story? He has gone mad because mad wars send people mad. Isn't there time for further detail and explanation in a two and a half hour of film?
(We are reduced to listening to a drugged out hippie - Dennis Hopper - for extra detail and insight!)
We are lucky in having some fine actors on show to disguise the nonsense and the murk - including the memorable Robert Duvall down by the beach. He tells us that Napalm "smells like victory," while in reality it smells a lot like spilt petrol. They should have made AN a "scratch and sniff" movie!
(A horrible and desperate chemical weapon that dominated a horrible and desperate war. Destroying a country in order to save it!)
The film was helped on its way to becoming a classic by being about depression, alienation and loneliness. Any poll of film shows (and IMDb is the biggest) shows these topics to be especially important. If marks count for anything.
(The world loves a comedy or a musical - but look how rarely a comedy or a musical wins open film awards.)
We have a great cast and we are on the road (or is it river?) to meeting the now late Marlon Brando - although we are really supposed to believe he is a character other than Brando. A Brando gone mad maybe? It can't be meant as a surprise because his image dominates the poster.
Brando showed through his onset actions (which you can read about elsewhere) that he had no respect for director Coppola and no respect for the film.Yet he captures and dominates the screen like no American actor could or probably ever will again - bar, maybe, Orson Wells.
At the end things blow up - not because it is in the script or was planned that way - but because the sets had to be destroyed and this was filmed. The Doors music plays against these images like a dream and you conclude that this is what death would really be like - if only death had taken lessons in drama and cinematography.