I love the smell of napalm in the morning.....

Rating: 10/10 (27 February 2005)

It smells like......victory. I wasn't there in Vietnam, just a tad too young. I guess it would be possible to do a movie about that war that displays its insanity better, but I certainly haven't seen it. Martin Sheen and crew of small PBR gunboat are sent deep (and I mean DEEP) into the unclaimed jungle to terminate renegade U.S. Army officer Brando. With each mile they travel civilization moves further and further away. Surrealistic film style captures perfectly what must have been the hell of Vietnam in-country (or any other kind of) service. Duvall is memorable as arrogant air cav officer obsessed with surfing even in the midst of bloody shore assault. Sheen (who I think suffered a heart attack during the filming) is Oscar-caliber as an ordinary guy just trying to do his damn job in the midst of bedlam, and Hall does well in role of stoic gunboat chief. As much as anything this movie turned the post-war attitude of many, like myself, who thought at the time that we should have been there. When you go this far out on a limb there are going to be some hits and some misses. Brando and the movie's final episodes are pretty much of a miss (Hopper makes it bearable), but the rest of the movie is so damn good it almost doesn't matter; the trip rather than the destination is the big story. I initially had problems with the Redux version as it adds to an already mammoth running time, but I've gotten to like very much the French colonial sequence and also Duvall's surfboard search. There are few moments in cinema that top Sheen's monologue inner voice talking about his mission and Kurtz on his way into the jungle. Another of those movies I feel like I lived, in this case its unpleasantness (that I also live with) keeps me from stopping by too often.