Apocalypse Now (1979) - film review

Vietnam, 1969.  Captain Willard, an American special operations agent, is in Saigon recuperating after a successful mission when intelligence officers approach him with a new assignment.  He must travel up the Nung River into a remote region of the Cambodian jungle, to track down and kill Colonel Kurtz, a former Green Beret who has set himself up as a local deity.  Believed to have gone insane, Kurtz has assembled his own army that is killing indiscriminately and posing a threat to U.S. military operations in the area.  Willard is persuaded he is the best man for the job and sets out with a small but dedicated team.  He can have no idea of the ordeal that lies ahead, or the horror that awaits him at his journey’s end...

Whatever you think of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, it is hard to dispute that it is a fitting response to America’s doomed military adventure in Vietnam.  Loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a powerful exploration of man’s dual nature, the film serves as the perfect visual allegory for a kind of collective madness that saw the United States embrace asinine barbarism in pursuit of the vaguest of goals at a cost that defies comprehension.  Coppola’s disgust for modern warfare shrieks out at the audience in the film’s most spectacular set-pieces - most notably the helicopter attack sequence which shows complacent American soldiers happily dishing out death to Vietnamese villagers to the strains of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.  The most potent anti-war statement comes at the end of the film when the hero, Willard, comes face to face with the man he is hunting, and sees the horror of what he has lived through, as if for the first time.  To date, no film has managed to express the rank insanity and sheer naked horror of war more forcefully than Apocalypse Now.  Coppola’s film is a dark and unsettling visual poem that, in a haunting dreamlike manner, exposes the diseased aspect of humanity which is dedicated to mindless destruction.  In the whole startling edifice of creation, there is nothing more horrible than man’s affinity for gratuitous self-slaughter, and this is what Coppola shows us in this, his bleakest film.

Right from its very inception, Apocalypse Now had a troubled production and at times must have looked as cursed as the Vietnam War itself.   Francis Ford Coppola had originally wanted his protégé George Lucas to direct the film and felt snubbed when Lucas chose instead to invest his time in his dream project Star Wars (1977).  Having decided to direct the film himself, Coppola then had some difficulty finding his lead actor.  After Steve McQueen and Al Pacino had both turned him down, Coppola cast Harvey Keitel in the role of Willard, only to replace him at the last minute by the comparatively unknown Martin Sheen, on the strength of the latter’s performance in the TV movie The Execution of Private Slovik (1974).  Marlon Brando was offered an unprecedented fee of 3.5 million dollars for a month’s location work, but turned up on set massively overweight.  The production cost spiralled out of control, the original 12 million dollar budget ultimately swelling to 31 million dollars.  In the course of the 238-day shoot, Sheen suffered a near-fatal heart attack and several of the cast and crew contracted serious illnesses whilst on location in the Philippines.  Coppola’s original cut ran to six hours, which had to be reduced to two and half hours for its theatrical release (excising entire sequences that had cost millions to shoot).   In 2001, the director re-released a new cut of the film entitled Apocalypse Now Redux, with 49 minutes of additional footage (although there is a wide consensus that virtually none of this adds much to the film and serves merely to weaken its dramatic power).

When Apocalypse Now was first released, it received mixed reviews, predictably as the Vietnam War was still a contentious and sensitive issue.  Before its release in August 1979, the film had a premiere showing at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the Palme d’Or (co-recipient of the award with Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum, coincidentally another film with an anti-war subtext).  It was also nominated for eight Academy Awards, although it only won in the Best Cinematography and Best Sound categories.   Today, Apocalypse Now is widely acknowledged as one of America’s most significant war film and is rated by many as highly as Coppola’s Godfather films.  This is the film that had to made, to banish any remaining illusions that the Vietnam War had been anything other than what it was - an unequivocal disaster for America and an enduring tragedy for mankind.  This is a film which, with its uncompromising depiction of war as a mental aberration. still has the power to arouse feelings of anger and disgust, but it can also make you weep - at the ease with which one set of humans can set about massacring another set of humans, just for the Hell of it.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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