When redux turns to reflux

Rating: 6/10 (10 January 2013)

When Francis Ford Coppola returned to "Apocalypse Now" in 2001, he produced more than just a director's cut – it was a veritable reworking of the original material.
Up until "Apocalypse Now Redux" the movie was generally considered to be a masterpiece – flawed – but in a category all it's own. Now, with the extra footage, it is even more flawed, and maybe not so deserving of its status as a masterpiece.
Burnt-out army officer Captain Willard, played by Martin Sheen, is ordered to find a renegade Special Forces officer, Colonel Kurtz played by Marlin Brando. Kurtz has been operating outside the scope of his orders and is believed to have gone insane.
Willard's journey upriver, where he is subjected to the same forces that eventually pushed Kurtz over the edge, gave this movie its resonance. The scenes added to "Apocalypse Now Redux" prolong the journey but diffuse the meaning in a way that surprises.
The greatest damage is done to Kurtz's character. That enigmatic presence has now been brought out into the light. The insights about the Vietnam War that were contained in the memorable monologue – "the diamond bullet of clarity" – are now referred to in a number of scenes and reiterated by Kurtz in a heavy-handed reading from Time magazine. Whatever the accusations about Brando's rambling style on the release of the movie in 1979, his performance was controversial and mysterious – you just couldn't be sure if you were witnessing genius. Now we have the answer, we probably weren't. "Apocalypse Now Redux" gives us too much information.
In an epilogue to the Kilgore sequence, Willard steals his surfboard. It makes Kilgore's character more human but also diminishes him. In the original version, Kilgore's last appearance is when he makes the "napalm in the morning' speech. The effect at the time – Vietnam was still a comparatively recent experience – was to say that no matter how tough the Viet Cong, no matter how fanatical the enemy, our side has men who are tougher, scarier and more fanatical.
If the extended playboy bunny sequence was originally edited out because the filmmakers thought it slowed the movie down – they were right.
The French plantation sequence doesn't really seem to fit either. Coppola wisely cut the whole thing out the first time around. Although the river journey is meant to be allegorical, it is as though the boat has sailed into the "Twilight Zone". The sequence is also used to extrapolate political views about the Vietnam War – the original version made its point very nicely without having to deliver a sermon.
Coppola's method of working is to shoot lots of stuff, and then put it all together like a jigsaw puzzle. He enjoyed putting "Apocalypse Now" together so much that he decided to put it together again. However by adding more, Coppola has managed to do what two decades of critics were unable to do, and that is to cut his great movie down to size.