Apocalypse Now Redux

Rating: Null/10 (12 December 2013)

The following is the review of Apocalypse Now Redux & not the original 1979 version.
The manic masterpiece that burnt every single creative brain cell of director Francis Ford Coppola returned to big screen after 2 decades with nearly 50 minutes of additional & never-seen-before footage. But the big question is if the new version is all its worth or not? If it in anyway pushes forward the unprecedented legacy of the original version or diminishes it? Although, Coppola went ahead with the Redux version thinking that this is the version people will remember his magnum opus as, it certainly didn't turn out to be as planned.
Apocalypse Now Redux, in my opinion, is quite inferior to the original 1979 version for a number of reasons. First, it slows down the entire film by a great deal. Second, it doesn't add anything that changes the overall impact of the film. And third, many of the new scenes added are boring & in some ways a little deviation from the tightly structured & meticulously edited original plot. Although, it does connect many dots that were missing in the original & many new scenes help the character development process, its 202 minutes of runtime is deeply felt.
If you haven't seen Apocalypse Now yet then go for the original 1979 version instead of this one. Apocalypse Now Redux can exclusively be enjoyed by only the die-hard maniacs of the original film. Even after 22 years, it's clearly visible that Coppola still hasn't fully recovered from what the traumatic production of this film did to him as the creativity in the re-editing isn't that classic anymore. Overall, Apocalypse Now Redux is still as hallucinatory & majestic a film as the 1979 version but is strictly for die-hard fans of the original than new viewers.