A trip, in both senses of the word

Rating: 8/10 (11 March 2007)

"Help!- Cú'u toi vó'i I am lost - Toi lec du ó'ng I am wounded - Toi bi thou'ng"
Say it in Vietnamese, Hoang-Vu Publishing House, Saigon 1963, page 1
Apocalypse Now is a trip in both senses of the word. A voyage trough a river in Indochina and a hallucinating trip that shows the eruption of feelings and sensations provoked by the war in the group that travels trough the river. It is a journey to the last circle of Hell: as you move on, the horror of war advances, makes itself clear in its absurdity. But Captain Willard's intentions are different from Dante's: he is to go to the bottom and kill the devil.
The first half of the movie can be read as a progressive's interpretation of the Vietnam war.The gratuity of American violence, the vision of war as a macabre sport("Charlie don't surf"), the despise of anything alien to American culture (and hence, the intention of bringing the USA with you to the other side of the world). Fear of othernerness as the mechanism that makes the soldier somewhat efficient.
As Willard and his group advance through a bloody Disneyland, filled with corpses of Vietcong and passive Vietnamese, they arrive to the line of front: the bridge that has to be reconstructed every night only to satisfy the needs of the propaganda machine. We are now at the middle of the trip (in both senses of the word), where Zombie soldiers, mad and calm, fight against an invisible and omnipresent enemy.
After the bridge is crossed, the film will become symbolic, and will try to explain Vietnam in a somewhat philosophical way: the forces of the barbarian, with their prehistorical weapons, decimate the supposed rappresentatives of Civilization, and the renegade Colonel Kurtz has installed a reign of terror and atrocities. He does it against himself, only to show (and to show himself) the vacuum that exists in the depths of Western Civilization: a vacuum that can only be filled with horror. The second part of the film is not as strong, not as tight, as the first one.
The music deserves praise. It works not only to put you in the times, but also defines the state of mind, the feelings of the characters and the feeling of war itself. On one side, it clearly shows the social function of music, as the expression of a generation that was involved, against their will, in the most atrocious violence and -uncapable of an organized rebellion against the system- turned their parricide vocation ("Father? -Yes, son -I want to kill you", says Jim Morrison) against other peoples and, finally, against itself.