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

Rating: 10/10 (16 August 2006)

Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is an absolute masterpiece. It doesn't really matter which version of the film you watch; the original '79 version, or the restored and extended "Redux" cut. Francis Ford Coppola has said that he personally prefers the longer cut of the film which was finally restored in 2001 and added an additional fifty minutes of footage cut from the original release because of it's already long running time of two and a half hours. When I first saw Apocalypse Now I watched the original version and I was instantly taken by it. It was dark, twisted, and surreal and unlike any other war film I had seen before. A few years later I watched the 2001 "Redux" version and was a bit disappointed with it initially. The extra fifty minutes didn't really seem to add much more substance to the overall picture and in return just ended up slowing down the film so much that it just dragged on. Since that time I have only watched the original cut of the film on DVD and still love it. It's one of my all-time favorite war films and probably the best Vietnam war film I've ever seen, and if it's not the best, because certainly Oliver Stone's Platoon is another Vietnam war film that I hold in very high regard, but if Apocalypse Now isn't the best film on Vietnam it's certainly the most original, darkest and fascinating.
The film uses Joseph Conrad's novel "Heart of Darkness" as the basis for the plot, but setting it in the middle of the Vietnam War. Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) leads a top secret classified mission to travel by boat up a long and dangerous river into Cambodia to assassinate a rouge Green Beret officer named Colonel Kurtz, played with a powerfully absorbing intensity by Marlon Brando. Kurtz seems to have gone completely and totally insane, and a local jungle tribe seems to have adopted him and worship him as some kind of God. Along the perilous journey the team encounters many strange and unusual people and places, including a gung-ho Lieutenant Colonel of the Air Calvary named Bill Kilgore, played great by a wild and fun Robert Duvall (in an Oscar nominated performance), that leads an all-out assault on a small village of Vietnamese, which is undoubtedly the most infamous sequence in the film. But that's just the beginning of this bizarre odyssey; as the small group of soldiers makes their way up the river they also meet some Playboy Playmates, and come across a nighttime battle over a destroyed bridge that is nothing but absolute anarchy and chaos, with no one seemingly in control of the combat. And just wait until Captain Willard finally gets to meet Colonel Kurtz, face to face; it's well worth the wait. Oh, and the scene where the cow gets sacrificed, that wasn't faked; that was all done for real.
Apocalypse Now is a wild and nightmarish vision of hell on Earth. Francis Ford Coppola's vision of the Vietnam War is so strange and surreal it might as well take place on an entirely different planet all together. The performances are all superb, not a single weak link among them. Among my favorites though has to be Dennis Hopper as an American photojournalist with a motor-mouth and always seems to be on the brink of madness. The Oscar-winning cinematography by Vittorio Storaro is phenomenal, and crisp with bolder darks and beautifully bright colors that look even better on the new DVD transfer. It looks so good it's actually hard to believe that the film is nearly thirty years old. And the action sequences are just another aspect of the film that seems to hold up amazingly well over the years. The helicopter attack sequence is breathtaking and still impressive, even by today's standards. The music of Apocalypse Now is another pretty interesting topic. It's mostly an orchestral score done with synthesizers and a few rock tunes from The Rolling Stones ("I can't get no satisfaction") and The Doors ("The End") and Robert Wagner's classical march "The Ride of the Valkyries", which is a piece of music that has become infamous with the film.
I recently re-watched the "Redux" cut of Apocalypse Now and must say that I did enjoy it more a second time around. Some scenes, while still feeling long and maybe a bit excessive, don't really feel as uninteresting or unimportant anymore. The additional sequence with the Playmates does still seem to be pretty pointless to me, but the scene with the French plantation now seems to have more of a purpose; of reminding Willard of man's potential for both good and evil. This scene used to seem slow and pointless, now it seems to make a little more sense when you think more about the ending and how important choices of good and evil play out. The extra fifty minutes of restored footage in the "Redux" cut seems to add a lot more character development and a little more comradeship to the soldiers, but also it makes the journey up the river longer and more "tiring", but in a good way. Personally I like both versions of the film, but choosing which one to watch really depends on what kind of film you're in the mood for. The original cut is more straightforward and to the point. Apocalypse Now Redux is a little more taxing to sit through (running at three hours and twenty two minutes), but has more substance, nudity and truly carries the weight of a dangerous and surreal journey into the heart of darkness. But which ever version you chose to watch, either way it's a masterpiece.