The War That Led To Insanity And Beyond

Rating: 10/10 (19 June 2008)

Attempting to stay clear of, by running parallel to, the clichéd "what is the point of war" motif, Francis Ford Coppola directs a stunning portrayal of loyalty, service and madness during the Vietnam war, perhaps the most surreal and nonsensical of all wars, through his most surreal and the most hard hitting about the condition of men in war, Apocalypse Now. Coppola never glamorises the war, he never shies away from showing the brutal nature of the war, capturing scenes of brutal savagery, the irony of which being that these acts of barbarism were not committed by the Vietnamese that were viewed as savages, but the Americans that came to liberate them.
Through the performances of his three leading men Coppola continually pounds in to the viewer the sheer insanity of the Vietnam war, that these were soldiers sent out to ostensibly protect the South Vietnamese (as well purge the ever spreading threat of communism) but ended up killing them as much as the Vietcong. That these men are trained to be killing machines and are then somehow expected to maintain morality. The jungles provide a wonderful backdrop to the film as they themselves become part of a transcendent blur, where these lines of consciousness and insanity meet, creating the feel of something out of a nightmare, when for many it was real life.
Martin Sheen as Captain Willard gives a memorable performance for as he progresses up the ever narrowing, ever encapsulating ever confining river the degrees of insanity he encounters increases, as does the ever increasing doubt in himself. Encountering Robert Duvall as the bloodthirsty war mongering Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore whose name sums up all that need be said. An officer who enjoys killing "Charlie" with a well executed plan as much as going surfing on a beach still hot with activity and gets his jollies from sniffing napalm in the morning breeze. As Willard learns more about the officer he must confront at the end of the mission the more of the officer he sees in himself, as a surreally erotic U.S.O shows turn the troops into lecherous madmen and he passes encampments where the occupants are permanently verging on schizophrenic he ponders over that line that others have crossed and he feels himself slipping onto.
The final confrontation leaves Willard in a state of moral upheaval, he sees why the men have succumb and understands their reasonings, and he sees that same potential in himself, which makes for the epic meeting between Willard and the seemingly deranged but philosophically poetic Colonel Kurtz. Kurtz is the personification of all that is whispering to Willard from one half of his being, apotheosising the negative aspects, into the god like being he presents before the natives. Finding himself in the uncompromising position of the head to head confrontation he must ascertain whether Kurtz is truly insane or whether he is seeing the world with unclouded eyes. Coppola's adaptation is an engrossing affair shot simply, in a realistically gritty manner. Delivered is a stark and brutal account of the nonsensicalities of war, the oxymorons and dichotomies, how the soldiers are expected to kill and yet somehow remain human. His leads carry the humanist element effectively and make it a convincing and utterly stunning affair into the psyches of men who must risk their all, and often in the process risk losing themselves. This isn't a story about Vietnam, this is the story of a man in pursuit, not of a colonel, but of himself against the forces that surround him.