What a great shoot-em-up movie!

Rating: 10/10 (4 February 2003)

Apocalypse Now is another of those films that is about half dream sequence. First of all it is a great movie. It has great characters: Sheen defines the height of his character actor career. Hopper plays his Easy Rider character o a T, but this time with a job and a camera. Duval, utters those immortal words "I love the smell of napalm in the morningÂ…" and "Charlie don't surf!", and Brando is at his best. It has plenty of Vietnam War action for you, whether you liked the war, hated the war or fought the war, and is a slam-bang shoot-em-up of the kind that has been replaced by the computerized action films of the 21st century. Realism or the lack of it aside (your opinion, your call) one can't help caught up in Sheen's Willard and his mission to terminate the command of Brando's Kurtz "with extreme prejudice" and all the entertaining and exciting stuff involved in this purposeful character's quest. Never does Sheen's character waiver from this purpose and seldom does the story of the film wander from this path. (when it does wander, you love it.) With "Redux", through the wonder of the DVD format (ever heard of too much of a good thing?) New scenes are added (swept up from the cutting room floor) and pasted in here and there. A new viewer of Apocalypse Now Redux might not notice that the bits are added, even though the movie has gone on past his bed time, but a veteran watcher of it might find them annoying, irrelevant, and easily skipable. To me the "Redux" version came down to this question: "OK, so they didn't change the ending, why did they change the end". In "Redux" I seriously miss the dreamy end with its combination of napalm, burning trees, The Doors and the final credits. I'd give up all the cutting room floor stuff for the original finale.