Truly, one of the very greats!

Rating: 10/10 (10 October 2017)

Whenever a conversation regarding your favorite movies come up, without hesitation Apocalypse Now always comes forth as the primary contender. Although it took me multiple viewings until I fully started to appreciate the movie for the masterpiece that it was. That for me seems to be the only downside of most truly great films- just a few hours are given for the immersion into the lives of several nuanced characters. While the (mostly) time consuming act of reading a great novel grants the opportunity to grasp the atmosphere of the plot without having to reread.
While obviously the movie revolves around the Vietnam war, the historical conflict itself seems to merely be used as a background. In fact, as quite a few other reviewers have pointed out, it has barely any real connection with the actual day to day life of the American soldier during the war. Instead it is a surreal and intense character study of psychologically distinct individuals on a boat going down the same route of consecutive stages of war-induced madness. Only a select few can endure the trip deep in to the heart of darkness without on the way losing oneself to violent bravado, lust and degradation, madness or cold, detached indifference for the rest of the world. This theme becomes more apparent as the characters delve further down the river, deeper into the jungle, slowly abandoning the Vietnam theater while the film adapts a more surreal, almost metaphysical focus.
It certainly is one of those movies that divides an audience and to its discredit far too often is compared with other films of the same (or similar) genre. Though it is truly unique, and the fact that (at least to my knowledge) for all these years since its creation no other director has dared to emulate something which doesn't seem to have a tangible formula, speaks for its longevity.