Like I was shot. Like I was shot with a diamond bullet.

Rating: Null/10 (15 August 2001)

I took a day off last week to look through the rest of my father's China slides at Columbia. I finished up early so I took the opportunity to go see Apocalypse Now at the Astor Plaza. It cost $10 but boy was it worth it. The additional footage was a treat. I now feel like I've seen a complete movie and for the first time it made sense to me. I actually got the gist of what Kurtz was about and why they wanted him terminated. I also got to know the boat crew better. In particular Chef. Frederic Forrest gave a great performance and much more of it was here. I've read that Coppola and Murch didn't just drop in the additional footage, that they re-edited the entire film and I can believe it. Almost every scene looked different to me, sometimes slightly but palpably so. I kept seeing things that I hadn't recalled seeing and found a rich and strange texture that I had never experienced before. Far from making the film messier, the additional footage made the film tighter for me, as I could really appreciate the orchestration of themes not to mention the sheer orchestration of materials to carry out the big set pieces (like Kilgore's raid). Also, seeing it on a big screen definitely helped. Especially in those parts where the added detail let you see pertinent details. For instance when Willard is reading Kurtz's dossier you can actually comprehend glimpses of the text and it's all very important (there's a reference in Kurtz's CV to his writing a thesis on the Philippines Insurrection -- a precursor to Vietnam). Even when Willard is reading Kurtz's manuscript at the end you could tell there was stuff in there that was actually relevant. It would be great if all those texts were presented on the DVD. All in all, I was immensely impressed. I watched a re-run of the Basinger series on American Film where they covered the war picture and it was very pro Platoon and anti Apocalypse Now. They even had a clip of Stone lambasting Coppola for his mythologizing artiness (boy, talk about the pot calling the kettle black). But I think the consensus now is that AN has stood up better than Platoon, because of it's more overarching approach. It's a bigger picture with a bigger vision, one that surpasses historical specificity. The film has taken on mythical proportions and will remain a monument of cinematic dreaming.