Pretentious pastiche.

Rating: 3/10 (9 October 2003)

Overblown, occasionally interesting, but mostly pretentious pastiche of Joseph Conrad's *Heart of Darkness*. The Vietnam conflict serves as the Ultimate Metaphor for Coppola, as he sends discharged Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) up the Mekong Delta. His assignment? Dispatch a certain Colonel Kurtz, a Green Beret who has apparently gone stark raving mad in the jungle of Cambodia. Along the way, Willard meets a middle-aged Robert Duvall who can talk about nothing but surfing (and in a Southern drawl, too), and a small crew of your typical 'Nam grunts that accompany him on his boat ride. The general point of the film seems to be that War is Hell, or that Man is a murderous savage at the very least. Wow, man.
Coppola throws so much at the screen that some of it is bound to stick and hold your attention. The scene where the Hueys glide above the breaking surf with Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyries" blaring on rigged-up speakers on the copters is justly famous (though nonsensical and over-the-top). Dennis Hopper in a brief appearance manages to steal the entire movie ("Did you know that 'if' is in the middle of 'life', man?!", etc.). Coppola's setting-afire of an entire jungle with Jim Morrison intoning "This is the end . . ." on the soundtrack is an astonishing sight, though necessarily modified by the knowledge that this film continues to be condemned for creating some of the worst environmental damage in the history of movies. And there's a truly chilling sequence in which Willard stumbles upon a last outpost of GI's engaged in a chaotic, meaningless firefight with an unseen enemy.
But most of the movie is merely the boat ride, accompanied by some truly dreadful faux-noir voice-over narration ("Accusing someone of murder here was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500" . . . you get the idea). Willard mulls over the spectacularly banal history of Colonel Kurtz, while the crew gets on each other's nerves. In the *Redux* version, there's an excruciating detour on a plantation that houses a group of snappily dressed French expatriates, a 30-minute digression that was edited out of the first cut for a very good reason: it's sophomoric. Anyway, on it goes, until Willard finally comes face-to-face with Ultimate Evil . . . which turns out to be just a middle-aged, overweight Marlon Brando, mumbling inaudibly, snacking on what appears to be macadamia nuts, and reading to Willard alternately between old issues of "Time Magazine" and T.S. Eliot's poetry. "It smelled of death in there," narrates Willard, referring to Kurtz' lair, "Of malaria . . . nightmares . . ." but we remain bemusedly unconvinced. Perhaps it smelled simply of macadamia nuts.