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Director - Francis Ford Coppola
Writers -
John Milius and Francis
Ford Coppola
Cinematography - Vittorio Storraro
Editor -
Walter
Murch
Music -
Carmine Coppola
Producers -
Francis Ford Coppola, Tom Sternberg, Fred Roos, Gray Frederickson;
Production designers
- Dean Tavoularis; Rick Heinrichs
Set Designers -
George R. Nelson
Special Effects -
A.D. Flowers
Casting -
Vic Ramos, Terry Liebling
Art Director - Angelo P. Graham
Additional Photography
-
Stephen H. Burum, Caleb Deschanel
First Assistant Director
- Jerry Ziesmer
STARRING:
Martin Sheen (Captain Willard);
Marlon Brando (Colonel Kurtz);
Robert Duvall (Lt. Colonel Kilgore);
Frederic Forrest (Chef
Albert Hall - Chief); Samuel Bottoms
(Lance); Laurence Fishburne
(Clean); Dennis Hopper
(Photo-journalist); G.D. Spradlin
(General); Harrison Ford
(Colonel)
151 minutes. Rated PG-13 for violence, gore, sexual references,
frightening scenes.
There is a conflict in every human heart between the rational and the irrational,
between good and evil. The good does not always triumph. Sometimes the dark side overcomes
what Lincoln called 'the better angels of our nature.'
—Capt. Lt. Gen. R. Corman (G.D. Spradlin)
Apocalypse Now Redux
The most critically acclaimed movie of the 2001 was made 22 years ago. Francis Ford
Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) stands on many critics' lists of all-time
favorites, and this new, longer version —
Redux — reveals further
Coppola’s ambition and brilliance. While the 49 minutes of added footage here say
more about ambition than brilliance, they do provide important missing pieces that
strengthen the film’s argument against war and, more convincingly, against the
American arrogance that led to the cataclysmic fiasco of the Vietnan War.
Martin Sheen stars as Captain Willard, an American soldier sent on a mission up the
Nang River through Vietnam into Cambodia to find and assassinate another American, Colonel
Kurtz (Marlon Brando). In a tense meeting with his superiors, Willard is shown Kurtz's
impressive military history, and he is told the long and sordid tale of Kurtz's
deterioration from an exemplary soldier to a power-mad rebel. "His methods
became...unsound," mutters the commander, looking halfway to crazy himself.
Kurtz has disappeared into the wilderness to start some kind of cult.
At first, Willard cannot comprehend how this "perfect soldier" could embrace
such brutality and the animal laws of the jungle. But the farther he travels into the
hellish battlegrounds of the jungle, the more he realizes the madness, audacity, and, yes,
"unsound methods" of America's participation in the struggle. As young and
bewildered soldiers die meaningless deaths around him, he feels his own soul, and sanity,
suffocating. In the end, Willard has some inkling that he perhaps he is as lost as the man
he has been sent to kill.
Basically an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, which sets
the story in the Congo rather than Vietnam, Apocalypse Now is about Americans lost
in a war they do not understand. Conrad's novel gave Coppola the perfect vehicle for a
cinematic odyssey into the heart of the Vietnam conflict.
It is also the perfect device for so many universal stories, mythic and true. The
journey is everyman’s road to self-discovery. Contrary to popular psychology,
"self-realization" is a slow road to a realization of one's own limitations,
helplessness, and innate evil. Even King David, "a man after God's own heart",
found absolute power to be absolutely corrupting. In Apocalypse Now the men
are not God-fearing, so they have nowhere to turn when they hit bottom. Thus the film
becomes a parable of the godless reaching the precipice at their wits' end.
It is also a story of family dynamics. Willard is a sort of surrogate father to a
crew of young and fearful recruits. As he tries to muster fatherly guidance to a
group of young punks, he can’t even bring comfort to himself, and then watches the
family crumble under pressure. When his men see that duty has robbed Willard of his own
conscience, their last hope for moral guidance and rescue from the inevitable darkness
disappears. They too are on the slippery slope to madness.
Perhaps most intentionally, Apocalypse Now is the story of a nation. One
country is trampling another in an arrogant rush to play "hero". But as
the authorities back home make decisions behind closed doors, the reality of warfare's
damaging effects is visited upon the sons on the front lines. And, contrary to the
press's reports (in this new version we listen to Kurtz reading polished PR from Time Magazine),
things are not improving. Innocents are getting shot for merely looking suspicious, and in
this kind of war you look suspicious if you look foreign. The movie is very hard to
watch; the camera doesn't flinch; we do. There are children in the trees where those
bombs are headed. And screaming mothers learn very quickly that you cannot carry
your frightened children and outrun the blast of a grenade.
This is not just gratuitous gore. This is even nobler than the realism of Saving
Private Ryan which tends to shout at us "Look how real it all is! Isn't it
terrible?!" No, Coppola reaches for something higher, more literary. Everything
on one side of a particular frame is juxtaposed with something elsewhere in the same
picture. While medics tend to the dying, other soldiers joke their way into a sort
of escapist surreality. Untimely comedy and the inconvenience of accident make
things discomfortingly real. One scene involving the discovery of a puppy alive in the
chaos is as heart-rending as the famous moment when a bull is sacrificed during a dark
ritual, but both suggest the same thing…the death of the innocent, natural world at
the hands of arrogance and confusion.
Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography is almost too good. He captures so much natural
beauty that we gasp and gape at the grandeur of sunsets, jungles, a fleet of helicopters
like bizarre locusts hovering on the horizon; but we're not allowed to enjoy it,
quickly
struck down hard by the undeniable foolishness and madness taking place in the foreground.
With unflinching boldness, Storaro shows us elements we are accustomed to seeing in scenes
of nobility and patriotism, but instead captures the truth of human ignorance, accident,
arrogance, and the way violence begets violence spiraling down into chaos.
The new material isn't entirely necessary, and some may find it excessive. When the
soldiers encounter the Playboy Bunnies that the government has sent to entertain them, the
scene is amusing for a moment and then becomes a nauseating display of lust, violence, and
chaos. But in the second encounter with the Bunnies, a new scene, we see the men pairing
off with the girls for romantic liaisons, and we quickly have another example of American
male arrogance, insensitivity, and possessiveness. It is as troubling and as hard to watch
as any scene in the movie. (There is a lot of nudity on display in this scene, but I can't
call it erotic. As the men pursue encounters to match their fantasies, it is difficult to
ignore the tragic, reprehensible hard-heartedness of the soldiers toward women who are
clearly numb with abuse and neglect.) Does it add anything to the story? I think the
"Bunny scene" deepens the film’s metaphor about specifically American
evils. But it does toe the line of excess.
Later, when Willard has dinner with French colonialists in the jungle, we are given a
lot of political information that gives the movie a more significant historical editorial,
but the scene is wearying and overlong. It is followed by a beautifully filmed romantic
liaison between Willard and a ghostly French widow, which is just as unnecessary, hitting
us over the head with a point that we’ve already learned: man is divided between his
will to love and his will to destroy.
But Redux’s virtues far outweigh its flaws. Apocalypse Now
— and
its Redux as well —
remains one of the most rewarding moviegoing experiences of
my life. See it on a big screen; to see it on video is to settle for a concert on the
radio rather than going to hear a symphony.
While many critics call The Godfather and The Godfather, Part 2
Coppola’s finest films (some, in fact call them the greatest movies ever made), I
prefer Apocalypse Now. The Godfather is strong in script, performances, and
direction, but Apocalypse goes beyond this into visual poetry, where the story and
the world in which it takes place are so forcefully beautiful and terrible that it seems
Coppola is just a tour guide —
wherever he aims the camera, mystery, nightmare, and
revelation are vivid and the screen is hardly big enough to contain them. You can
practically feel the heat from the helicopters, smell the sweat on Captain Willard’s
furrowed brow, inhale the cold dank mist down the river. The jungle is soundtrack enough,
so he restrains the soundtrack to the most necessary moments. When music does come
in, it is attached to character. The Doors' songs resound in Willard’s head like
a musical curse, and "Flight of the Valkyries" is the theme song of choice for a
half-mad military leader as he leads the charge on Vietnam from a height where he
doesn’t have to see the anguish on the faces of the dying. (You see, a movie about
American soldiers in Vietnam doesn’t need a riveting soundtrack; the soldiers are so
media-saturated that they prefer to fight with a soundtrack piped right into reality.)
Coppola's greatness is that he binds all of these searing images and sounds into a
meaningful purpose. When humankind decides there is no god beyond itself, it slowly
spirals downward into self-destruction —
no film portrays this truth better. There are
painful moments when these broken men seem ready to cry out for God, but instead they
reach for the wrong things. Every man that Willard encounters along his dark path is at
another stage of madness born of despair. The film inadvertently echoes Ecclesiastes
— human
effort is futile without the humbling, guiding influence of God's grace and love. It is a
giant DO NOT ENTER sign posted at the edge of the human heart's sinful abyss. I can think
of no more fitting portrayal of hell in the history of movies than the moment when Colonel
Kurtz comes a culminating moment of self-realization and gasps, "The horror, the
horror." Just as troubling, though, is the film's opening line...as we see
Willard's face upside-down in the frame, perhaps at the end of his journey and thinking
back, we hear him murmur, "I am still only in Saigon." The damage is
done. Like the Radiohead songs says, "There are trapdoors that you can't come
back from."
Apocalypse Now is great art, powerfully exposing (rather than condoning or
merely sensationalizing) evil. Once the disease is exposed, perhaps we can live in better
health. Perhaps faced with darkness like this, people will be more likely to turn toward
light. As difficult to endure as this movie can be, it may be a redemptive experience
after all.
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