A Movie Nearly Every Night: Apocalypse Now

Apocalypse Now (1979) (regular and Redux (2001)
Dir. Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall

This is the end...

Why do I like this movie? It's a boy movie, a war movie, a violent and disturbing movie, but it's also an incredibly complex and detailed movie.

It's fascinating and absorbing and now that it's on Blu-ray it's clear, deep and hypnotic. The sound, which is a large part of what makes this movie so great to begin with, is even better on the Blu-ray, including this little touch that I missed on the DVD:


Willard is holding up a picture of his wife and I always thought he was just staring at her. Now you can hear the cigarette burning a hole through it.

Man, and the details ... the production design, set decoration, and art direction are all fantastic, intricate and crazy complicated. There are details to every scene: in the papers on Willard's hotel table or in Kurtz's dossier, including a lovely photo of Scott Glenn --


-- and Hopper's 80 lbs of camera equipment slung around his neck --


-- and Chef's beat-up copy of Henry Miller's Sexus --


-- and the bizarre holiday lights spanning the Do Long Bridge (which appear to be taken from the Brooklyn religious festival in Godfather Part II) --


-- and this little scene, cut out of the first version and restored in the Redux where they meet up again with the Playboy Bunnies at the Army outpost.


Everywhere is complete chaos and nothing is empty space. Add Coppola swinging his camera around and the deafening noise that builds tension until it explodes and it's completely recreated war in all its randomness. You can't help but get sucked into it. What makes this frightening spectacle so appealing is that this is all done before CGI. They had one chance to blow up a line of trees and get it on film because there was no going back and doing it again. No wonder Coppola kept threatening suicide and Martin Sheen had "exhaustion" ("He has a heart attack when I say he has a heart attack!" -- Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about making this movie, is highly, highly recommended).

And maybe that's why I can't appreciate movies like Avatar. That's just sitting at a computer and making stuff up. In Apocalypse Now they had to put it together with actual props and people and that takes a lot more work, a lot more precision and a lot more creative people to make it go.

But, sure, war is horror, and that's hard to take when it's this clear and noisy.

"I'm not goin'! I'm not goin'!"

Horror is reiterated again and an again in Kurtz's monologues to Willard ("The horror ... the horror...") and in the visuals that alternate between blowing things and people up and the remains of things and people who have been blown up. Kurtz surrounds himself in horror (not shown here because it's pretty gruesome) so that he's both part of it and master of it, but also completely lost to it. You either try and make sense of the horror and go mad like Kurtz and Willard, or you ride it like a wave, like the "cavalry" officer Kilgore.

"I love the smell of..." oh you know the rest.

Duvall plays Kilgore on a balance between operatic and straight. He's bigger than life, but he's also very matter-of-fact: "If I say it's safe to surf this beach, then it's safe to surf this beach!" Kilgore embraces his job, keeps an eye on his soldiers, and controls his destiny. Opposite him is Willard, the "grocery boy sent by clerks to collect a bill" and Kurtz, the career soldier who fought his way through the ranks until he became "like a god" to his bloodthirsty followers.

So the men in charge are out of their minds or trying to hold onto authority or both, while the masses of men out doing the work are wandering lost and confused ("Who's the C.O. here?" "Man, don't ask me that.") grasping at anything to make their lives in "the shit" bearable.

The USO brings the Bunnies to the jungle with predictable results

Who's in charge? The captains, the men, the colonels, the crazed lunatics who rise above the crap and try to rein in the destruction? No one's in charge, people. You just do your job and hope you can survive it.


John Milius clearly appreciates Conrad's themes of madness and destiny, what constitutes authority and humanity, but this is still its own story with its own statement on good and evil, winners and losers: "You're fighting the biggest nothing in history!"

Which brings us to the Redux and the visit to the French plantation.

You think you can cut me out, eh? Well, I guess you can. merde.

At first, I kind of liked that this was included, but on watching the shorter version again yesterday, I've got to agree that it really does slow down the action. We've been through so much with the PBR crew, and, sure, this gives a touch of civilization to the madness, but it also keeps you from getting to Kurtz. You just want to get to Brando and see it through and if that means losing Christian Marquand ... well, so be it, I guess. Does it change the meaning of the film? No. You already know that it's a crazy world and Willard is neither one of the men nor one of the leaders. He may be one of the civilized who succumbs and then overcomes the insanity at the end, but hanging out with the French doesn't really give you any additional insight into that.

But once you get to the end of the river and Kurtz's bizarre compound, you want to include Brando surrounded by children while he reads Time Magazine. It's a little odd, sure, but I think it should have remained in the first version or maybe traded out for the one of Hopper yakking at Sheen in the bamboo jail.

Brando and what appears to be a young film critic

Finally, my favorite part of the movie, because I always have a favorite part, is the inclusion of Assistant Director Jerry Ziesmer as an unidentified member of the group who assigns Willard to the mission -- the shirt and tie suggest CIA, but he never says who he is. All he says is:

"Terminate with extreme prejudice."

It's his only line.