A grand failure

Rating: 6/10 (27 March 2009)

Apocalypse Now and Then is what screenwriter Robert Towne said of this movie: magnificent and a shambles in equal measure.
It's sprawling range and portentous style are awesome as is the photography and there are many failed films saved in reputation by the photography. Citizen Kane being a prime example.
While it's worth watching, even in parts according to interest and time availability, the first hour is better than the rest, and especially the third hour in the Redux version.
The reason is the writing: a narrated film about a character that has not appeared is not a drama, it works in a book, and Hearts of Darkness is stunning prose, although the portentousness wears thin toward the second half.
In a movie the novelists' technique fails because we can see the world, framed and edited, but essentially realistic. In that space the drama should be performed, or else it's a novel with pictures and a narrator, which is what Apocalypse Now is. The writing has to be interesting, in the narrator's mouth and the dialog, as there is little real drama happening to keep the audience involved, but here the script misses exposing the extent of Coppola's mediocrity as a writer.
In Apocalypse the characters are meaningless, although events happen to them to show the audience how depraved war and this war was; but on and on the background intelligence progresses as the real drama is an intellectual one played between US foreign policy and the American people, especially those who were anti war.