Coppola's masterpiece about madness in the Vietnam War. 42 minutes longer and in some ways even better. 4 And A Half flys out of five

Rating: Null/10 (4 February 2002)

Apocalypse Now /Redux The reissuing of old films, usually called director's cuts, can amount to a bit of bore really, but Francis Ford Coppola's reedited Apocalypse Now does offer some especially interesting additional material to what was already one of the best films ever made. Coppola allegedly went back to original rushes and reedited the film from go to woe. Of course most of Apocalypse Now was and is an absolute classic; an ode to fearless film making. The bulk of this film could not be improved!
This tale tells of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) traveling by patrol boat up a river in Vietnam during what the Vietnamese called The American War. He's on a mission to assassinate a rogue American master soldier called Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) who's assembled a private army of Montagnard tribes people. But what of Kurtz and what of Willard? How crazy are they and what of their environment? Coppola paints of picture of a world gone absolutely mad, or at least the world run by the American military. Normality is careering about, coloured by death, confusion and catastrophe. Some soldiers like Willard get off on the violence and can't function any more away from it. He's only half a step away from insanity. Others like Kurtz become renegades, and seeing too much fall to despair.
Midst this there's the American war, in its latter stages where chaos is foretelling defeat. A world where a bulletproof cavalry chief (Robert Duvall) forces terrified sailors to go surfing while they are being shelled. A world where the Vietnamese seem to be just targets for helicopter gun ships. So what of this new version of Apocalypse Now? Well it looks terrific with a reworked print which has produced outstanding lush colours.
The sound and music of the original which were always absolutely outstanding have been remastered digitally to make them even more impressive. There is an additional playboy bunny sequence which although suitably strange interrupts the flow of the film. And there's an extended sequence with some French civilians which has some value, particularly their account of the politics behind the Dien Bien Phu battle which saw the French colonial forces ousted in 1954 from Vietnam by the Viet Minh led by Ho Chi Minh. There's additional dialogue on the patrol boat and most importantly extra dialogue for Colonel Kurtz which lifts Brando's previously murky performance in the film considerably. This version is 49 minutes longer than the original and at 3 hours 17 minutes could probably do with another edit, but it's still marvelous.
4 And A Half Astonished Flys out of five