My Oh My

Rating: Null/10 (23 July 2000)

How can one describe "Apocalypse Now"? Well, it is certainly ambitious, perverted, wild, chaotic, insane, and overall exceptional. The film deals with a war-weary Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) who is assigned to kill a Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once great military man who has gone crazy and created his own civilization deep in the jungles of Vietnam. While traveling upstream to meet Brando, Sheen reflects on his experiences and the film becomes stranger and more hypnotic. He meets an equally crazy officer who "loves the smell of napalm in the morning" played by Oscar-nominated Robert Duvall. Duvall leads helicopter corps to overhead assaults of Vietnamese villages, destroying everything in sight. More situations follow and the film twists and turns into more chaos. Coppola's film was a near disaster that somehow succeeds through it all. The screenplay is strange to say the least (I think that was the plan all along), but everything else is right on target. This is one of the greatest war (or anti-war films) ever made. "Apocalypse Now" is also the last great film made in the 1970s. The performances by Sheen and Duvall are excellent. Brando just makes a token appearance during the film's finale and he is hardly seen because the cinematography is so dark near the end. Also look for a young Laurence Fishburne and a crazed photographer played by Dennis Hopper. Try to spot Harrison Ford in a cameo near the very start. An excellent achievement, worthy of 5 stars out of 5.