Coppola and Milius: The Hollow Men

Rating: Null/10 (20 November 2005)

Apocalypse Now is a film about madness, about its attendant chaos and about the many forms it takes at a time when the (American) world and war has gone awry. It's not an easy film to watch and, unless I have seriously misunderstood the intentions of the filmmakers, it is neither successful nor the masterpiece so many claim it to be. The themes of madness and chaos in this film could also, it seems, be applied to both its making and the inexplicable reactions it has provoked
Loosely based on Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, inspired also by T. S. Eliot's darkest works, and containing an implicit suggestion that established narrative structure cannot adequately describe the darkness of man's soul in the modern world, the impression is that Coppola fully succeeded in achieving everything he set out to achieve: a thinking man's take on the collective madness that engulfed the US hierarchy and destroyed a generation of its young men. Trouble is, Coppola was making movies while they were fighting, and co-writer John Milius's chronic asthma prevented him from military service, so that what we have here is a philosophical study that lacks the necessary component of personal experience  and it shows. While that doesn't make Coppola and Milius's view any less valid, the self-indulgent nature of some of the passages becomes unacceptable. Sheen's narration sounds like something out of a cheap pulp fiction novel at times and, when you get right down to it, all we have here is the same message being hammered into our brains over and over and over again.
This is one of those films that fuses art with populism so, between all those long sequences in which Coppola focuses on mythic narrative and dwells on its place and purpose in the midst of a brutal war, we get to see surfing soldiers and crowd-pleasing helicopter attacks played out to the thundering strains of the Ride of the Valkyrie, and sex-starved soldiers rioting over a trio of gyrating Playboy bunnies. Apocalypse Now is a self-perpetuating legend whose reputation, like the war it depicts, has grown out of control.