Film Review
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.
© James Travers 2010
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Next Francis Ford Coppola film:
The Godfather: Part III (1990)