Francis Ford Coppola Lays Bare "The Horror" of Combat!

Rating: 9/10 (2 February 2016)

With a famously horrific shoot, it's now almost unfathomable how Francis Ford Coppola managed to harness the chaotic energy into one of the most potent examinations of war and masculinity to ever grace celluloid in his masterpiece Apocalypse Now.
The story, based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, centers on Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), a US Army intelligence officer with a mission to travel into Cambodia and terminate the command of the renegade Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) - a colonel who went crazy and went native, forming his own Montagnard army out in the darkness of the jungle.. Needing to get back in the game, Willard takes the mission and finds himself among a motley crew. Nobody on the boat really understands the mission, least of all Willard himself, who keeps squinting at Kurtz's dossier and marveling at what a model soldier he was. Perhaps Kurtz hasn't gone rogue; perhaps he has simply achieved military apotheosis, carrying out the logical extension of the armed forces. Along the way he bonds with the crew of the boat taking him up-river as they encounter a gung-ho surfing Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), a sexy French woman, a few Playboy Bunnies, a free-wheeling journalist and more war-time horrors than they could have imagined, until he finally meets Colonel Kurtz. This epic dark fantasia ends on a rather elliptical note, which seems the only way for it to end.
'Apocalypse Now' is a confounding mix of the conventional and the surreal, a man-on-a-mission war flick that expands into a meditation. There is greatness to it, but there is also madness, and they feed off each other. From its opening scene of Capt. Willard falling apart in a Saigon hotel, the movie is a nightmare trip into the darkest reaches of the human soul. The depth and audacity of Mr. Coppola's vision makes even the most ambitious of today's films look timid and dreary by comparison. His direction is impeccable, capturing both the intimate detail, overarching spectacle and layered depth of meaning, often all in one shot and thus delivering a harrowing masterwork that bursts with malarial, mystical images. The movie is stunningly beautiful to look at, remarkably moving and horrific, and jammed with memorable characters in unforgettable situations. The score is wondrous, the production design solid and never overdone, and the cinematography is just wow.
On the acting front, Martin Sheen brings astonishing sincerity to Willard and is entirely believable as the cipher, the burned-out husk who's seen too much death to be at peace. Robert Duvall's brilliant turn as Col. Kilgore - a near-cartoonish hawk who lives and breathes war, rings with bracing energy. But the movie ultimately belongs to the maestro himself – Marlon Brando. In a role that has all off 15 minutes of screen time - most of which is spent mumbling in the shadows, delivering hipster rants about atrocities – Brando is extraordinary as the great bald shambling mountain, who both does and doesn't seem to be the monster we've been waiting for.
By any standard, Apocalypse Now is a masterpiece, a towering achievement of sight and sound - an epic freak-out, a fever dream of immense proportions, laying bare the stark horror and unimaginable thrill of combat.