The Jungle Is Giving The Orders Now

Rating: 9/10 (18 August 2007)

"Apocalypse Now" is one of the most exciting classics in American film, a singular work of art offering both benediction and indictment. Benediction for those who found themselves suffering and dying through the futility that was the Vietnam War. Indictment of those like me who watch its vividly horrifying yet magnetic depiction of man's inhumanity to man and come away asking: "Yes, but what about that poor puppy?"
Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) is an airborne intelligence officer holed up in a Saigon hotel room, his life a wreck as he awaits an order, any order, to rouse him from his soul-killing lethargy. One comes in the form of a mission to track down renegade Special Forces Col. Kurtz, no longer taking orders from the Pentagon as he prosecutes his own war.
"Terminate the colonel's command, sir?"
"Terminate with extreme prejudice."
Everyone talks about the killer beginning, with good reason. Everything from Willard's opening remarks about still being in Saigon to a scene aboard a sampan 90 minutes later is simply remarkable. Every time I watch it, I'm blown away again by some element of it. The great dialogue ("Charging a guy for murder in this place was like giving out speeding tickets at the Indy 500"), the hellacious acting (Sheen is so outstanding in his opening breakdown scene that he hardly needs to twitch a face muscle for the rest of the film and we're still with him all the way), the editing (the attack on the Vietnamese village is so intense it makes the accompanying Wagner music sound like the Archies.)
None of the three elements mentioned above won an Oscar. Editor Walter Murch did win one for the sound of the film, but otherwise this was something of a Waterloo for director Francis Ford Coppola, at least at the time. It took a while for people to recognize "Apocalypse Now" for the masterpiece it is.
Two reasons for that, I think. One is that the film is incredibly dense and ambitious, really requiring video and cable for its greatness to sink in, as was the case with "The Right Stuff". The other is an ending that, while good by itself, is a marked letdown from all that came before. When we meet Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), it's clear he's not equal to the build-up. No one can be, but he decidedly isn't. After hearing him billed as the one American officer successfully outfighting the Viet Cong, we meet instead an overweight pundit who holds court in a kind of Woodstock with weaponry, reading high poetry and declaiming the use of napalm as if Brando hijacked his character with his own legendary leftism.
But there are too many majestic sequences to carp about that very long. Coppola and co-screenwriter John Milius set up the helicopter attack in such a way we root for the Americans though we are painfully aware that the village they are attacking contains women and children. Robert Duvall, sensational as an Air Cav commander named Kilgore, calmly sips coffee as ack-ack flies around his copter cabin. The first time you see it, you're amazed at his cool. Then you realize why shouldn't he be cool? He's holding all the chips. The real heroes are the ones shooting at him.
The sampan scene (that introduces the puppy) shows the Americans in an even worse light, yet the anxiety of the Navy personnel in the sequence is understandable. Nothing is glorified, but the liberal anti-war message is more subtle than we are used to seeing from Hollywood, and thus more effective.
Everything about "Apocalypse Now" is more effective. So what if it didn't win any Oscars, or hold its singular greatness all the way up to the end? What it gives us is more than enough. It's probably too much for many people even today. But that's what's so great about it.