Coppola's phantasmagoric ode to the madness of war

Rating: 10/10 (10 April 2006)

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War is a kind of madness. It has its own logic. Kill or be killed. Follow orders, follow the leader. Go crazy. Do horrific things. Become a beast. Do all of this in a steamy jungle amid a alien culture for an unclear purpose in an ineffective way and you've got some idea of what Vietnam was like. Coppola's Vietnam is the Vietnam of a soldier's Thai stick/acid trip. The filming actually took place in the Phillippines, but no matter: that's better than Kubrick's excellent Full Metal Jacket which was partially filmed on constructed sets in England of all places.
The jungle is dark and green and deep and unbelievable lush, filled with snakes and tigers, insects that bite and swarm, bats and spiders and little tan men who dig tunnels and can't be seen. You shoot at the jungle, and you shoot and shoot and shoot. And you can imagine the effect it has. Like trying to kill flies with a .357 Magnum. Which is what we tried to do in Vietnam.
Army Capt Ben Willard (Martin Sheen) on R and R in a Saigon hotel, going stir crazy, drinking Martell Cordon Bleu and passing out, gets a knock on the door. He has orders: go up river into Cambodia and terminate an army colonel (Marlon Brando) who has gone AWOL. Oh, and by the way, Colonel Kurtz in his charismatic madness has built his own little unauthorized empire in the jungle, fortified with crazed admirers. You might want to approach with caution.
So this is the plot: a quest to a forbidden land with fantastic adventures along the way providing us with a view of the war from a gunboat. The flares at night, the "purple haze," the tracers flying at the boat, the fog, the black nights, the little things the men do to retain some semblance of sanity, smoke a jay, polish your boots, reread a letter from home.
And then there is the ordinary madness of the war lover personified in Robert Duvall's swashbuckling army colonel who likes to take off his shirt and watch his men surf the waves as all about him bombs are bursting and bullets flying. But he never flinches because to flinch would show weakness and possibly a lack of love for what one is doing. In one of the most memorable lines in all of filmdom, Duvall declares, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like victory." Well, there was no victory. There was only the blood and the bombs, the jungle that could not be beaten back or Agent Orange'd enough, the mud and Charlie, always Charlie hidden somewhere, disguised or invisible and unkillable, like a hydra-headed monster, and dead bodies of your buddies on their way back to the land of the big PXs in body bags. And yet there is always the mission, and so upstream Willard goes. And the more he reads about Col Kurtz the more he admires the man. And then when he gets there, the question arises, how can he penetrate the Colonel's jungle fortress? He has been advised, belatedly, aboard the boat when it was too late to turn back and refuse the mission, that he had a predecessor, someone else sent to terminate Colonel Kurtz. So Colonel Kurtz will know why you, Capt Willard, are coming to visit.
He calls you a messenger boy. You are put in a bamboo cage. A photojournalist (Dennis Hopper) turned worshipful admirer of the Colonel gives you water, lights a cigarette and puts it in your mouth. Delirious dreams and phantasmagoric nightmares, surreal imaginings and the haunting face of Kurtz and his poetry, quoting T.S. Eliot and Andrew Marvel, flood your mind. You have called an air strike should you not return, and then--was it a dream or was it real?--the head of the soldier who would call the strike is delivered to you on a banana leaf--something like that happened or didn't and maybe you will soon be, or already are, as mad as the Colonel.
Coppola and crew spent two years in the jungle filming this. It is a great epic of mystery and beauty, a fantastic picture of the war, part brutal reality, part imagined enchantment with fascinating characters indelibly spun out by one of the greatest of all film makers. By all means see this for Francis Ford Coppola, one of the few directors who could be considered a genius.