"Redux" is overblown, overlong, and pretentious

Rating: 5/10 (20 June 2007)

Over the last two years, I have made it my goal to see as many classic movies as possible. I've fallen in love with dozens of great movies, like the films of David Lean, "The Wind and the Lion", "Casablanca", "The Godfather Part II", "Sunset Boulevard" - too many too mention. There have been some classics which I've not been entirely satisfied with; I've been slightly disappointed by "My Fair Lady", "Spartacus", and "Citizen Kane", among others. But at least I enjoyed them, and found some merit in them deserving of classic status.
Today, I had a mind-altering experience. I watched "Apocalypse Now: Redux", the three-and-a-half hour cut of Francis Ford Coppola's infamous masterpiece of madness and war. And I learned a very valuable lesson which, as I embark on my college term as a Film Studies Major, I will always keep in mind: Not all classic movies are great. Not all classic movies are even good. Some are too long, some are excruciating to watch, some try to hard to be "deep" and "meaningful" when in reality they're just a pile of pretentious pooh. And then, some movies add an hour of footage to an already long movie and make it agonizingly slow-paced. "Apocalypse Now: Redux" is one of these; it's a movie that starts off interesting, has flashes of genius, and then, at about the two hour mark, begins a long, slow decline in entertainment value and seemed to be begging for us to accept it as a great movie. Well, sorry, but you don't get an A just for trying.
Based on Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", the film concerns Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), a burned-out Special Forces officer who is sent on a suicide mission up a river into Cambodia, to assassinate the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), now fighting his own private war with an army of Montagnard tribesmen who worship him as a demi-god. As Willard and his companions go further up-river, they find their mission descending further into madness and depravity. By the time he finally reaches Kurtz's camp, Willard is forced to confront his own perceptions of war and morality.
It boggles my mind to think how this movie is considered THE definitive Vietnam movie. It is not about the Vietnam War, any more than "Raiders of the Lost Ark" is about World War II. Most of the movie, despite all the period details, could take place at any time, any place. This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, and to be fair, the film does have some intriguing analysis of the Vietnam War and the US involvement there. But it's not the point; in essence, the movie is just some guys looking for a crazy guy hiding out in the jungle.
Perhaps the movie's biggest flaw is in its characters. None of the characters are one bit sympathetic. Willard and his crew are pretty much caricatures of Vietnam soldiers - burned-out, half-crazed drug addicted war criminals. Anyone who thinks that these are accurate characterizations of Vietnam soldiers gets their perception of the War entirely from movies like this. Whatever valid points are made about the futility of the war, and about the cruelty of human nature in general, are largely drowned by these two-dimensional characters who "bug out" at the slightest provocation. It's difficult to care what happens to any of them, and made worse that some of them are downright unlikable. The very young Mr. Clean (Laurence Fishburne) and the spaced-out Lance (Sam Bottoms) are particularly annoying; I kept waiting for the latter to get knocked off, and I would have been relieved if he had.
The film does contain some extremely memorable scenes, and in terms of direction, cinematography, and editing, it is brilliant. The helicopter attack scene with Robert Duvall's Colonel Kilgore, the confrontation with an unarmed sampan, the tiger sequence - all are brilliantly done set pieces. But the film also contains a lot of superfluous, digressive nonsense, namely the Playboy Bunny scenes and the unnecessary and ridiculously long scenes at the French plantation. These scenes ruin the pacing and help sabotage the fairly effective set-up, which had promised great things. The film is finally done in by the ridiculously overlong and overdone ending at Kurtz's compound. Marlon Brando's pontifications about the horrors of war are neither original nor insightful, and after all we've seen, it's hard to be anything but numb to his ramblings by this point.
Nor are the performances anything to write home about. Martin Sheen does an excellent job with a two-dimensional character who has little real depth, but otherwise, a fine cast is largely wasted. Marlon Brando's performance consists of mumbling T.S. Eliot and condemnations of war with shadow on his face - not exactly up to Terry Malloy or Vito Corleone. Dennis Hopper's journalist is very annoying, and at any rate introduced far too late to be of any importance. Robert Duvall, while also a caricature, is perhaps the most memorable and amusing character of the film. The rest of the cast - Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Albert Hall, Frederic Forrest, G.D. Spralin, Harrison Ford - are simply ciphers who fade into the jungle.
"Apocalypse Now" may have been an obsessive labor of love for Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, and Co.; it may be a technically brilliant film; it may be significant; it may have entertaining moments; it may even have some pertinent things to say about human nature in general and the Vietnam War in particular. But it is not, in my opinion, a great film. Poorly paced, largely incoherent, and very distant, "Apocalypse Now" set me up for a great film in the first two hours and then left me high and dry as it slowly lumbered towards an atrocious conclusion. Call me a philistine or uncultured, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
"The Horror", indeed.
5/10