One of the best films ever made

Rating: 10/10 (28 February 2006)

This is one of the finest films ever made. Francis Ford Coppala took a huge budget, a huge cast, made a location film outside of the US and took a controversial topic, being the Vietnam War and managed to put all this together and emerge with war film unlike any other. Martin Sheen as the principal character on his mission to his confrontation with the renegade colonel is outstanding. Marlon Brando as that colonel dug deep into somewhere to come across with his memorable performance. Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Harrison Ford, Sam Bottoms, Frederic Forest are among the excellent cast. This film has great acting, great character development, a great screenplay, fantastic sound, incredible editing, outstanding cinematography and it's art direction and photography are superb. Just so many elements that go into making a great movie so successfully accomplished here that it's hard to appreciate a single technical element with so much going on and cohesively coming together. The inventive storyline was such a departure to everything that had been shown on TV and in the papers and magazines about coverage of the Vietnam War and it's depiction and reference in other films. The trip up the river begins like a Tarzan movie and evolves into Road Warrior movie and to a Star Trek mission to a western to a psychedelic freak show with a war going on all around it. I've seen this many times but remember when I saw this in the theater when it first came out and people instead of talking among themselves about as they left the theater were just going Wow! This film had eight Academy Award nominations, all deservedly so, but only won two for Sound and Cinematography. I would give this a 10 on a scale of 10 and highly recommend it.