It wasn't just insanity and murder, there was enough of that to go around for everyone.

Rating: 9/10 (24 July 2011)

Apocalypse Now is directed by Francis Ford Coppola who also co-adapts the screenplay with John Milius from Heart of Darkness written by Joseph Conrad. It stars Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, Harrison Ford, Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms and Albert Hall. Cinematography is by Vittorio Storaro and the music is primarily arranged by Carmine Coppola.
The Vietnam War and Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Sheen) is approached by American intelligence to go on a secret assignment: he's to follow the Nung River into the remote Cambodian jungle to find and assassinate Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a member of the US Army Special Forces who has gone insane.
One of the most talked and written about films of all time, Apocalypse Now remains to this day a harrowing and haunting experience to first time viewers. With a production shoot that has in itself become legendary, Coppola's flawed masterpiece has been dissected and argued over to within an inch of its magnificent life. People will continue to write about it for ever more it seems, perhaps there might even be the odd new confrontational spin on what resides within? But ultimately it's what the individual takes away from the film that matters, our own interpretations key to the enjoyment of such a disturbing vision of war and violence.
Many of the set-pieces, dialogue and characters have long since passed into folklore, and rightly so. The Ride of the Valkyries helicopter assault, Kurtz's surreal death camp, the boat people massacre, purple haze, the playmates, Kilgore, and of course the horror, the horror..indeed. The performances match the quality of Storaro's sumptuous Philippines photography, Sheen is fiercely committed and Duvall and Hopper in turn are powerhouse and edgy. While Brando, doing his own bizzaro thing in the last third, brings a little chaos unintentionally in keeping with the madness at the heart of this particular darkness.
Personally that last draggy third does stop it from being a complete genius type whole, but everything up to it is so damn good it's arguably churlish to expect perfection? But as near perfection movies go, Apocalypse Now proudly sits with the best of them, sitting there with a harrowed look upon its face. 9/10