Coppola's zenith

Rating: 10/10 (3 November 2010)

The granddaddy of all Vietnam War films only improves with each successive viewing; in years to come, long after the others have been all but forgotten, this will be the one still being watched and talked about. Worthless as history (and never intended as such) it nevertheless is a triumph of filmmaking, showing astonishing craftsmanship in every moment of soldier/assassin Martin Sheen's obsessive search for renegade Special Forces Colonel Martin Brando. The plot is episodic (even rambling) as it follows a narrowing river deep into Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but unlike later, more popular treatments of the war it never pauses to stroke the viewer's guilt or wrap the conflict up in any sort of tidy resolution. Despite the obvious care lavished on every frame, the narrative remains even more messy and incoherent than the war itself, with each new sequence becoming more surreal and disturbing until the final, hypnotic confrontation with Brando and his native army in the pit of his own private jungle hell. Audiences continue to respond more to the helicopter attack on the Vietcong village, ironically the only conventional, 'old-fashioned' war movie scene in the entire film (a point driven home by the heroic Wagner fanfare). The last act, by contrast, is usually dismissed as too murky and cerebral, perhaps because it shows all too clearly how the human conscience becomes an irrelevant luxury when faced with the moral depravity needed to effectively exterminate an enemy. That's not exactly a message anyone wants to hear; witness the patriotic justifications for Operations Desert Storm and Just Cause, and the invasions of Panama and Granada, to name but a few of our post-Vietnam overseas adventures. The end result is a climate of horror few other war films have managed to capture.