Visually stunning, easily Coppola's best

Rating: 9/10 (22 June 1999)

First of all let's get my beef out of the way. I know this is a really stupid reason to give a movie only 9.5 out of ten instead of the 10 that it deserves, but Marlon Brando bugs me. In this movie, he was on screen for no more than fifteen minutes. He was paid an exhorbitant amount of money and he was nothing but a problem on the set. He was constantly too high to do his lines by heart, he was so fat and out of shape that Coppola had to do his scenes in a different shade of light just to make him look plausible as a soldier. His attitude alone put the film over-budget and behind schedule and that bothers me. When one person thinks he is bigger than the collective whole, it takes away from the experience of watching the film. It was impossible for me to watch Brando on screen and not cringe. He was a disgrace to acting and to his profession and I am glad that he is no longer around Hollywood. Having said all that, I will now get to what is good about Apocalypse Now. And that is everything else.
This is certainly one of the best films ever made and it is so because of how dark it is and how realistic it feels. Martin Sheen is so brilliant that it is scary. And of course who can forget Robert Duval's performance. But what makes this film over the top and the classic that it is, is Coppola's attention to detail. The helicopters flying in the background, the explosions over the horizon, the unseen enemy lurking imminently in the darkness. This is the first war movie that I had seen that made me think I knew what the horrors of war were really about. With everything this movie stands for, it is a shame that it lost best director that year and it is really a tragedy that Kramer vs. Kramer beat it out for best picture. What a terrific film.