Apocalypse Now

The year is 1979. America is still reeling from its tail-between-the-legs retreat from Vietnam.

Pop music has had virtually nothing to say on the subject with escapist Disco, The Village People, Donna Summer & the elder statesmen of Rock like Paul McCartney & the Rolling Stones still ruling the roost. There are stirrings from Max's Kansas City where bands like Television & Patti Smith have burned brightly and then fizzled but newcomers like Blondie, Devo, The Talking Heads & The B-52's are threatening something new but hardly the heralders of any great analysis.

In movies, Woody Allen's narcissistic Annie Hall is all the rage and the only comment on the debacle in Vietnam has been Michael Cimino's evil-gooks-sendin'-our-boys-nuts epic, The Deer Hunter, which has earned a bucketload of Oscars and seems to suffice as the purgative that the American public need to start to heal their scars.

Meanwhile, Hollywood tongues are wagging about renegade Francis Ford Coppola, who is still making Apocalypse Now, based on Joseph Conrad's novel Heart Of Darkness, and who started at about the same time as The Deer Hunter.

Apocalypse Now movie review: stars Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen

Apocalypse Now Redux

Word has it that the original Apocalypse budget of $16 million has blown out to $32 million and Coppola has had to mortgage everything he owns to fund the extra costs, making it now about 4 times that of the average big movie, in terms of:

budget
shooting time (238 days) &
edit & post-production time (2 years)

In fact, with The Deerhunter having cleaned up around the world, the word on the wind is that Apocalypse Now will be a turkey has got so strong that Coppola is forced to premiere an unfinished version at the Cannes Film Festival.

KA-POW!

Apocalypse Now is steamin! European critics go crazy. It's the anti-war film to end all anti-war films and though the American critics are wary, knowing that they all-to-frequently disagree with their European counterparts, the world is waiting to see just what Coppola has turned up with.

Apocalypse Now Redux trailer

When Apocalypse Now finally arrived, it was seen by liberals as genius, turbulent, hallucinogenic & amoral

And it was seen by conservatives as depraved, turbulent, hallucinogenic & amoral

And what we see now is a stunning piece of cinematic history that eventually garnered 8 AcademyAward nominations but no gongs, (and you make of that what you will) and looks every bit as terrifyingly appropriate today as it was then.

Apocalypse Now tells the story of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) who is sent deep into Cambodia, technically a non-war zone, to terminate with extreme prejudice, Colonel William Kurtz (Marlon Brando) an eccentric U.S. soldier sent upriver on a covert mission, who the brass believe has gone mad.

Willard is informed that Kurtz has killed 4 South Vietnamese double agents...without trial. His fighters seem to have tasted the blood of Vengeance and have set himself up as some kind of a demi-god. Kurtz now has his own private militia and seems intent on fighting the war against the Viet Cong his own way.

Willard journey upriver harrowingly tells the story of why America could never win in Vietnam, from drugged out kids playing with guns to Playboy bunnies go-go-dancing in the middle of nowhere.

His journey ends when he discovers that Kurtz, with the mind of a philosopher, rather than that of a soldier, has merely joined the dots that others are unwilling to do and that his war, Kurtz's terrible war, is the only winnable war.

Willard understands that there is no moral war, only the morality of immorality.

Sheen is fantastic. Utterly believable as a corruptible man clinging to the fragments of Sanity. Brando, astonishing, as a corrupted man who has made the terrible leap to the other side. "The Horror," he says, in the movie's most famous line, "...the Horror."

Sheen's crew accompanying him up the river:

Clean (Lawrence Fishburne)
Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms)
Frederic Forrest (Chef) &
Albert Hall (The Chief)

...all provide delicately painted performances of 4 ordinary guys who cannot take that leap.

Robert Duvall is unintentionally hilarious as Kilgore, the Cavalry/Chopper squad commander. He gets the movie's other famous line: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning...it smells like...victory."

Dennis Hopper, trippy, verbose & sycophantic as an un-named American photographer (was he acting?) a photo-journalist, a small man in awe of Kurtz

By the 1980s, Apocalypse Now was recognised as a genuine classic, defying categorisation:

a pained reaction to the Vietnam war
a great, impressionistic celluloid painting
a bold, brutal statement about war in general

...thankfully captured on film just a few years after the event, when emotions hadn't been yet dimmed by Time. Then in the late 1990s, Coppola had a revelation:

"...A few years ago I was sitting in a London hotel and I noticed Apocalypse Now was going to be on television...and I always enjoyed the opening, so I started watching and I ended up seeing the whole movie.

What struck me was that the film - which had always been so demanding, strange & adventurous when it first came out - now seemed like something that the audience had caught up to..." Hollywood.com

He contacted original editor Walter Murch and from March to August 2000, they re-edited the film from scratch. They had just under 2 hours of unused material and eventually added 3 scenes, 49 minutes, in all (creating a 3-hour duration):

the French Plantation sequence (French Colonials who decide to fight to the death rather than give up their home of 70 years + Willard's brief dalliance with Roxanne (Aurora Clement), as much a mentor for him as Kurtz.
the second Playboy bunny sequence (funny, moving & weirdly sexy) &
a third but short, pivotal sequence with Kurtz quoting Intelligence reports from American papers and magazines of the day which are patently lies

These extra scenes now make Apocalypse Now Redux, much closer to the Cannes Film Festival cut and, I believe, a considerably stronger movie than the original theatrical release. As editor Murch says:

"...The film now has greater continuity on a technical and emotional level...Ironically, by adding footage in many places, we managed to make the film feel shorter..."

The only quibble I have is that I'd have loved the soundtrack (written by director Francis Ford Coppola & his brother Carmine) to have been re-developed as I feel that the Moog-synthesizer-dominated score is a little chintzy. Other than that, it's a stunning new cut.

Unfortunately Apocalypse Now Redux was released for theatrical distribution on August 3 2001. 37 days later, on Sept 11, 2001, the American public was in no mood for an anti-war movie. They wanted revenge because they felt that the Apocalypse had actually begun and they were not going to go down without fighting.

Apocalypse Now DVD

"...If God and Wagner had teamed up to make a film about Vietnam, starring a 400-pound bald Marlon Brando, this is what you'd get..." Amazon reviewer Bookenator

Apocalypse Now soundtrack

"...As originally released, the soundtrack album was equally groundbreaking: an intriguing, dreamlike collage of dialogue, sound effects, and music that both evoked the film's artistic sensibility and underscored the innovative, Academy Award®-winning efforts of sound designer Walter Murch....

...Two decades later...the new soundtrack album seems stripped of virtually all of Murch's key contributions. What remains is primarily music..." Amazon blurb

"...I should point out to potential buyers, as I didn't learn this until I actually listened to the CD, that the version of The Doors' "The End" is actually the interesting remix heard in the movie, complete with synthesizer enhancements, chirping jungle crickets, and Jim Morrison's Oedipal vulgarities brought to the surface, instead of buried under the instrumentation as on The Doors original recording..." Amazon reviewer Shane K. Bernard

"...The inclusion of the finale where Martin Sheen's character steps out in his "transformed assassin shadow glory" haunting and very moving. It is one of the great moments in modern cinema and in music soundtracks..." Amazon reviewer M. Stoltenberg

"...Director Francis Ford Coppola was in the process of conceptualizing his musical underpinnings of "Apocalypse Now" when he attended a Grateful Dead concert at the invitation of the late impresario Bill Graham. In the "Drums" segment of the evening, when Hart and Kreutzmann let loose with their percussive underworld of innovative instruments, he found the perfect accompaniment for his cinematic vision of the Apocalypse. Hart and Kreutzmann were recruited to bring together the myriad sounds and "colors" for this retelling of the primal myth..." Amazon blurb

Some of the Amazon reviewers are a little upset that the "complete" edition should have included Heart Of Darkness: A Film-maker's Apocalypse, a documentary by Eleanor Ford Coppola, the director's wife, is unfortunately not available presently. However, her personal story of that time is:

Coppola's wife's memoir