Film Review: Apocalypse Now

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Its worth noting first of all that my most recent viewing of this film was of the Redux version which restores 49mins worth scenes cut from the original version. The longest section of added footage in the Redux version is a chapter involving the de Marais family's rubber plantation, a holdover from the colonization of French Indochina, featuring Coppola's two sons Gian-Carlo and Roman as children of the family. Coppola famously said that "My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam" after discussing the huge amount of money and problems the crew went through in shooting this movie.

Helicopter attack on the VietCong to 'Ride of the Valkyries'

The legend of many Vietnam war films and the struggles they had filming in such inhospitable conditions has become par of the course. Although an alcoholic Martin Sheen having a heart attack on location which was covered by Coppola from the media just added to the frenzy. Martin Sheen said if he could use one word to describe the shoot for this movie it would be 'chaos'. A lot of the scenes didn't involve scripts and were ad-libbed by the actors at the time especially in the final act with Marlon Brando which at times does show to its detriment.

U.S. Army Captain and special operations veteran Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) returns to Vietnam despite his drinking problem. He's assigned a top secret mission off the official records to travel down the Nung River to Cambodia to kill a rogue Colonel (Marlon Brando) who is apparently insane and running his own troops in the jungle. As Willard and his crew descend down the river they witness the true horror of the war in Vietnam and become far removed from the reality we all know.

Captain Willard (Martin Sheen)

The trip down the river is an obvious metaphor for Willard leaving reality and heading into another world of evil and insanity as he slowly crawls towards his target of Colonel Kurtz in Cambodia. The realism in the film was incredibly intense, Sheen's poor health due to his condition and the searing heat meant as the shoot went on he genuinely looked like someone struggling mentally with what was going on around him. Many of the dead bodies hung around the base that Colonel Kurtz ran were real dead bodies that a local man had supplied but instead of getting them from the hospital he had taken to grave robbing. The grim realism of the film is key to portraying Coppola's overall message. In essence, Apocalypse Now is so much more than just a film about war as it touches on the human psyche and the horrors of war much like The Deer Hunter did just a year earlier. Although The Deer Hunter takes a very different angle on what is principally the same basic theme.

The extra 49mins were not particularly relevant to the overall plot and theme of the film so were rightly left out of the original theatrical release.  In essence, Apocalypse Now is so much more than just a film about war as it touches on the human psyche and the horrors of war much like The Deer Hunter did just a year earlier. Although The Deer Hunter takes a very different angle on what is principally the same basic theme.

3.5/4 Another classic Vietnam film on the horrors of war