All the Children Are Insane

Rating: 10/10 (7 September 2011)

The most startling thing about Apocalypse Now Redux may not be the reinstated footage, but the new Technicolor dye-transfer prints. Rather than chemical color development, dyes are transferred to the film directly, bringing about the genuinely astonishing '40s, '50s Technicolor look: Sumptuous, striking, razor-sharp, glowing, with deep, authentic blacks. The consequently voluptuous and wringing wet material look of a film like this is what's threatened by digital projection. Coppola also thrusts the blanket off with the re-mastered soundtrack, which envelops us. To return home from the hell-on-earth production situation on the Philippines with a film of such specialized mastery is mind-blowing. It discredits modern apprehension. To watch it is to be elevated to the pinnacle where movies truly can actually take you, but just so seldom do. The film is a timeless cathedral hall echoing with the genuine reverberations of the war in Vietnam, in all their convolution and grief.
The story involves a voyage upriver by Capt. Willard, who orders a patrol boat to infiltrate enemy lines and determine the mysterious fortification of the virtually legendary Col. Kurtz, one of the Army's most decorated combatants, now commanding his own group of tribesmen. When you unearth who Kurtz has become and what he is thinking, you can see how the war took such a large role in malforming the elemental American idealism. The movie is a succession of set pieces. The most famed is the attack on a village, announcing itself with the helicopter loudspeakers blaring Wagner at the petrified students and teachers, enduring with Lt. Kilgore, hard-wired to disregard the value of Vietnamese life, and his blustering audacity on the beach, multiple times distracted completely from brutally killed or suffering Vietnamese villagers by the subject of surfing. Other sequences are also in the everlasting remembrance of moviegoers: The drugged tedium of the river expedition, the unexpected barrage of bullets that massacres a boat, the Playboy Playmates entertaining the much too frustratedly eager troops, the trancelike ultimate advance toward Kurtz's compound, the shadowed Kurtz and his grim maxims, the sniggering acquiescence of the stoned photographer, the Citizen to his Caesar.
To the magnificence of these scenes in their movement to Kurtz's famous last words, Coppola supplements 49 minutes, most of them invested in a stopover by the platoon to a French cultivated area, a colonial leftover that somehow endures. At dinner the Americans and French argue the colonial saga of Vietnam, and Willard's eyes encounter those of a widow who'll finish the night in his embrace. Other restored footage comprises dialogue and exploits on the boat, later comic relief with the Playmates, and added Kurtz interchange. Most importantly, this Redux is not merely a Lucas- or Spielberg-style "special edition," a slight variation on the same song, but an original version of the movie, from scratch. Coppola and his longtime editor Walter Murch, one of the very best at his trade, re-edited the film from the initial uncut raw footage, and so probably even some of the shots that seem the same to us are different takes than those we experienced before.
The 1979 version frightened Coppola, he says, feeling it was too long, too bizarre and didn't answer itself in a sort of typical climactic battle. Confronting financial ruin, he fashioned it for the conventional audience of its era, and 20 years later, seeing it again, he found it comparatively meek. To deem this ordeal middle-of-the-road or tame in either form is a peculiar ruling for Coppola to decide on his film, but then he has a record of being rash and perplexing. My own sentiment is that the 1979 version was neither conventional nor tame, but grand, ambitious filmmaking on a magnitude within the spread of but a handful of directors, Tarkovsky, Lean, Eisenstein, Kurosawa. Right down to expressive decapitated heads and the shadow of arrows accosting a boat populated by lost, disoriented men, Apocalypse Now is the modern Aguirre in cinema terms, as well as modern Conrad in literary ones. The Redux consequently prompted my doubts. I was ecstatic to see the supplementary footage. But did the movie require it? No.
Regardless, some of the newly seen footage seamlessly crosses the work's threshold and evaporates, deepening it. That would take account of the river footage and some instants with Hopper's photographer. The new Brando footage, including some more barbed examination of the war, is an important adjunct. What gives me the most discomfort is the French plantation sequence. It's protracted enough that it sidetracks from the movie's complete sweep. The river passage sets the film's pulse, and too much time on the banks arrests it. But the sequence is cogent and even abrasive, despite the glaringly cringe-worthy music during the love scene. Carmine's inexplicable use of educational video-level synthesizer music, which is inspired when it's low-key, but is otherwise unforgivable and agonizing. Again, Coppola being completely baffling.
Longer or shorter, redux or not, and whether or not one morally agrees with using the actual ritualistic slaughtering of an actual animal as a dramatic tool in a fictitious story, and whatever other issue one may have with a unique cinematic affair of such runaway, limitless passion to an almost transgressive degree, Coppola's overpowering head trip is, regardless, one of the crucial dealings of a film-goer's life, a threshold test, a virtual reality even. To have it in this stunning print is a treat, your eyes and ears awash with its lingering vision and the reverberation from the continuous rotor blades of helicopters and from distant blasts.