Not the Vietnam movie you might have expected.

Rating: 9/10 (9 May 2011)

I saw the 1979 version first, and recently both this and the Redux version. The original is a much more powerful film so I'll address it first.
First off, this is not a movie about the grunt experience. It's a sweeping overview of the entire war, filtered through the experience of one airborne Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen), assigned to a special mission to off a renegade Special Forces colonel (Marlon Brando).
This film covers in short vignettes many of the contradictions of Vietnam: 1. The opening scenes deal obliquely with the difficulties of Vietnam vets in dealing with life back home. 2. The contradiction between bombing peasants out of their homes and relocating them while telling them that "we are here to help you!". 3. The distinction between the US forces bringing massive firepower onto positions against guerrillas that bring down expensive helicopters with suicide attacks with grenades. 4. The relative luxury of US soldiers in the field (with radio, tapes, dope, motorcycles, booze, flown-in steaks, surfboards, and Playboy centerfold shows) vs. the Viet Cong R&R consisting of "cold rice and rat meat". 5. The refusal of American military and political leadership to recognize that the conflict could only be settled by total war or political settlement, or that the Viet Cong movement was not linked seriously to either Soviet or Chinese Communism.
"Apocalypse Now" delivers these messages in a series of powerful visual montages: the opening scene with the 'thwock-thwock' of chopper rotors melting into the sound of an overhead fan; quiet, peaceful looking rainforest exploding under a napalm attack; the exquisite charge of an airborne unit descending on a VC village in a hail of bullets and Wagner; a quiet boat ride upriver interrupted by hell breaking loose in gunfire, or the sight of the tail section of a downed B-52 rising up out of the fog.
But the key line of the movie is the one delivered by Brando: "You're neither (an assassin or a soldier). You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill." A brilliant summary of the US Army brass at that time.
The movie leaves open the question of whether Kurtz was truly insane, or whether he simply went beyond his purview because he recognized that the only way to defeat the Viet Cong was to be as brutally committed as they were -- that is, total war and obliteration, which would have been politically unacceptable to the US public.
The 1979 version is one of my favorite movies of all time.
The Redux version is an excellent example of why movies are edited. It includes a couple of sexually-based episodes, one with the Playboy girls in an abandoned medevac unit, the other with a group of French colonists. I'm as much of a fan of seeing female nudity as the next guy, but neither scene advances the story, so it was wise to delete them.
There is also an extended scene involving a funeral for 'Clean' and a dinner with a group of French plantationers expounding on the pre-history of the US involvement. I can see that it also would have been a distraction from the feel of the movie, which is a shame because I suspect even now that few Americans know about what happened prior to US entry and how the US supported the Viet Minh (later Viet Cong) to fight against the Japanese in WW II. (Sound familiar?)
The one real mistake in the movie was including Dennis Hopper as the spaced-out photojournalist hanging out with Kurtz. I love Hopper, but his character was totally unnecessary here. Laurence Fishburne is remarkably unrecognizable as the skinny boat gunner Clean. And Robert Duvall chews up the scene as the AirCavalry colonel.