Seriously over-rated: Potential Spoilers

Rating: 4/10 (28 September 2008)

I realize that I'm in the minority on Coppola. His sensibility is melodramatic and his penchant for freakishness is annoyingly distracting. I am also bothered by his frequent resort to bizarre camera angles and extreme lighting effects. For example, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is introduced at the beginning of the film with his head upside down on the screen while a dream- scape of attack helicopters and napalm bombs rushes through his mind, frequently obscuring his face. Toward the end of the film, Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), whom Willard has been pursuing under orders to assassinate him, is introduced in blackness and only gradually emerges into light in an overly l-o-n-g scene. Among the freaks in this film are Robert Duvall as a commander of a helicopter attack squadron who likes to wear a horse-cavalry cowboy hat and is obsessed with surfing and Dennis Hopper as a crazed cameraman whom Willard finds among Colonel Kurtz's devoted followers. Coppola's visual imagination, which served him well in the Godfather films, undermines Apocalypse Now in my estimation. It was a VIOLENTLY successful film but the moral which is supposed to be at the center of this film is deeply buried under costly (but ultimately cheap) directorial trickery.