REDUX: better *AND* worse, and a Phantom Edit might be perfect

Rating: Null/10 (5 September 2001)

Well, I have finally seen the "Redux" version, and it was interesting.
The original cut of the film survives in the memory as a great failure, filled with searing images and sequences, but with NO cohesion between the set-pieces, and leading up the river to the Waterloo of Coppolla's artistry, the Kurtz sequence, which never worked for a minute, then or now. And, if anything, the film was overlong. If you were to ask me for a list of films that emphatically did NOT need to be any longer, "Apocalypse Now" would be at the very top.
But what was particularly interesting at the time was that lack of cohesiveness in the first half of the movie. Coppolla had made his name in his earlier films from his ability to sketch in characters economically and well, and that was completely missing here. You gained no feeling for Willard or the characters on the boat, and it didn't flow, it jerked from image to scene to whatever, each piece in itself memorable, but not building any dramatic arc or impression.
Well, "Redux" changes that. With some small additions and re-structuring, the first half to two-thirds of this really are the great movie Coppolla so desperately wanted it to be, which feels and moves infinitely better than its original cut. The feeling of traveling up the river to a more grimly primordial world is palpable, and almost wholly lacking earlier.
For example, the stealing of Kilgore's surfboard gives a greater sense of Willard's character, because it's a reaction to Kilgore. In the original cut, it's all passive. You never see Willard reacting to what he's experiencing, he just observes, and the portentous narration tells us what he's thinking.
Unfortunately, it's still a grand failure. The film skids to a stop in the famous French plantation scene, and the utter dramatic failure of Brando as Kurtz makes the end of this cut as unmoving, embarrassing, and boring now as it was 20 years ago. The tremendous improvement of the first two acts of the film throw into high relief how badly the last act doesn't work.
I suspect Coppolla knows this, in his heart. He did lots of subtle restructuring and re-editing of the first two-thirds of the film, but virtually none in the last third. There, he just threw in the French plantation scene and an extra scene with Kurtz, and called it good.
Maybe what we need is a Phantom Edit version. Maybe Willard should get up the river to a vast anti-climax, with Kurtz already dead ("Mistah Kurtz, he dead"), and nothing to show for the journey. That would leave a version of the film with the good bits kept and the bad bits discarded, and an ending that would work, as opposed to the one it's got, which still doesn't, and which detracts from the parts that are worthwhile.