A hellish cruise for a nihilistic crusade ...

Rating: 10/10 (14 April 2011)

Attempting to analyze a movie like "Apocalypse Now" is as futile and dangerous as naively asking: why do people kill each other? Any answer would fatally disappoint. So the most honest approach is to admit that some things are morally wrong and some others are obligatory, and when the two unite, then I guess, you have an idea of what hell is about  hell, as the most eloquent and representative synonym of war.
The genius of Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece is to depict war in a cinematically powerful form, which is, let's face it, one of the most exhilarating and psychologically gripping experiences ever. To watch "Apocalypse Now" is to feel the essence of war, to hear its heart-breaking cry and to witness its devastating damages  the film makes you think less than feel, the film transcends any abstraction. War is a state of mind, yes, but war is made of fights, guts splattered, instant deaths, cries, shouts, explosions of napalm and insanity, genuine breakdowns and orgasmic thrills  everything is real, yet, with a depth never reached by another War film, before or after. There will never be another "Apocalypse Now".
The film challenges your perceptions with an incredibly haunting cinematography, taking you in a road whose end is uncertain  but uncertainty is like the uncomfortable pillow while patriotism acts as sleeping pills. In more comprehensible words, the value of life is so questionable in wartime that the very idea of winning and losing is useless. Are we humans or are we tools? Why the war? If "Apocalypse Now" answered these questions, the script would have lost my respect. But instead of telling us why the war exists, Coppola shows what war is. It doesn't even make it more rational, or more understandable, but the film is not about answering questions; it's about making us question ourselves.
And we question ourselves. In the boots of Captain Willard, a man whose strange top secret mission will plunge him into the depth of the insanity governing a War. But "Apocalypse Now" is not a descent into madness; it's a thought-provoking script inviting us to a journey introspecting the very meaning of War as a conflict that tortures our minds. War starts inside us. And the first victim of a war is not the man we'll kill, it's our spirit that we destroy forever, this part of us, for which, human value had a meaning. And forever means forever  we banish ourselves from human community as soon as we participate to war. It's a duty condemning us for eternal alienation, for a purgatory, whose symbolic incarnation is the Colonel Kurtz's tribe, the objective of Willard's mission.
Kurtz, created a universe where War has been pushed to its more extreme expression. He reached his breaking point and literally went insane, alienated by a desire to grave War in golden letters, to give a meaning to his military duty. And Coppola's approach is a stroke of genius, because it leaves us perplexed, torn between fascination and disgust, and our guilt to lean towards the former one. The movie doesn't try to inspire our disgust; it respects our intelligence enough not to be judgmental. On the contrary, we respect these men fallen in the trap of an inevitable insanity. They may be assassins, soldiers; they're still men as long as they tried to follow a path made of an idea of what is duty. Yes, they're morally wrong, but in wartime, the only right is to win. Fighting is obligatory. The rest is bullshit.
And this is why "Apocalypse Now" is the movie that best defines war. Because this bullshit, whatever it is, is made of the most precious things you have in your life. And you, soon, get the feeling, that the movie invites you to discover a universe where your only choice is to die or to survive by becoming more ruthless and cold-blooded than your enemy. Kurtz knew that. Willard will know that. And we learn that. "Apocalypse Now" is not about war, it IS War in the most horrific and realistic view. It's real, it's made of feeling, not ideas, the only ones who express ideas in the film (I'm talking of the Redux version) are those who don't fight. Fighters don't think, they cry, they shout, they object, but ultimately, they kill or are killed, there are no alternatives, and when you kill, it's not to be killed.
It's about learning to kill; it's about exploring the most efficient ways to terminate the enemy, about desensitizing ourselves to feel the power not to fear war, but to spouse it in a bloody nuptial nightmare. Desensitizing, indeed, no passion in War, no excitement, no entertainment, no enjoyment, whoever enjoys war condemns himself for death or failure. This is why the first segment of Willard's twisted odyssey is to enlighten us about the inevitability of the American defeat, and the exhilaration driven by the iconic Ride of the Valkyries' helicopter scene, by Colonel Kilgore's charisma, by the bunnies' sexy dancing, or the psychedelic effects of the "Satisfaction" scene, with the water skiing, are just misleading. The road is on the river, the boat is the only referential, but the closer they'll get to Kurtz, the more palpable will be the effects of war. And to get Kurtz is to become Kurtz, and to understand Kurtz is to understand war. To understand war, is to understand hell.
Francis Ford Coppola is a genius, because he offered to Cinema a unique creation, defining Cinema as an Art, as something meaningful, with a strange capability to make us feel something we didn't experience, like the emptiness of a hellish War where the only way of survival is killing, and passionless killing though. No room for feelings, this is the Apocalypse. And the way the movie opens, speaks loudly the horrific message to humanity  This is the end.