The horror, The horror

Rating: 8/10 (12 November 2016)

We have to wait until there is only a quarter of the running time left before Marlon Brando comes on as Colonel Kurtz. But it's worth the wait to see him give a fabulous performance as a decorated US Army Colonel who has gone over the hill and off the deep end.
Until that time we watch Martin Sheen as an intelligence officer given an assassination assignment to terminate Brando. Brando as a soldier did his job well, too well maybe. Now he's set himself up with an army of Montagnard tribespeople as some kind of potentate deep in the jungle across into Cambodia where Americans aren't supposed to be in any event.
Francis Ford Coppola gave this film almost a surreal quality, it gets more surreal as the PT boat aka swift boat journeys up river to the Kurtz compound. It starts with the real war enough, but even that is a Sam Peckinpah like violence ballet with Robert Duvall replete with western cavalry hat leading a raid on a Viet Cong stronghold at the river mouth with the strains of Wagner's dance of the Valkyries. Duvall loves his aroma of napalm in the morning.
I liked the river journey when Sheen sets out on that PT boat with the ever present mist over the river. It has Hitchcock like suspense, you never know what they will encounter and neither do they. You also see what war has done to the crew in that kind of atmosphere never knowing when they might meet death with an enemy who doesn't operate in the traditional ways of war.
I was lucky enough to see the Redux version with the sequence of Christian Marquand and his plantation. It was cut for length in the original film, but it's worth seeing now. All of those countries used to be called French Indo-China, still remember it on Atlas maps when I was a lad. He's got his manor house there and it's home to him and nobody is going to push him out. An attitude similar to people who followed Ian Smith in Northern Rhodesia when the rest of Africa was shaking off colonialism. I'm glad the scenes have been restored.
Brando is only in briefly, but his performance as the cracker doodle, but perceptive Kurtz is something to see. Also note that Scott Glenn previously sent on Sheen's mission and freelance reporter Dennis Hopper have become Brando acolytes and also standout in their cameos.
Apocalypse Now is not the best Vietnam War film. My own preference is Casualties Of War. But it's definitely worth a look.