APOCALYPSE NOW Movie Review
1979 Francis Ford Coppola
Opinion has always been divided over Francis Ford Coppola's ambitious Vietnam epic. To some, it takes inexcusable liberties with the realities of the war and the geography of the country. Others criticize the crackpot pseudo-philosophical pretensions of the final act. Finally, many reviewers and moviegoers admit those flaws and love the film anyway. Place me in the third group. Repeated viewings over the years reveal a boldly realized hallucinatory vision of war and a cast of complex, complementary characters.
That opening layered montage—helicopters, distorted sounds of rotors, a thick row of jungle palms erupting in a wall of flame, a sweaty face fading in and out, the spooky beginning of The Doors’ “The End"—establishes a mood that the film never really loses. It's heightened by the next scene in a hotel room, where Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) shatters a mirror and collapses in a drunken breakdown. (The moment is real, by the way, as Eleanor Coppola recalls it in her book Notes (Simon & Schuster. 1979).)
The rest of the film takes its structure from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Willard is assigned to go to a place deep in the Cambodian jungle where a Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) has gathered a Montagnard tribe and is slaughtering everyone around him. “His ideas and methods became … unsound,” as a General (G.D. Spradlin) puts it. Willard is to assassinate him. To get there, Willard takes a small plastic boat, a Navy PBR, upriver. Its skipper is the no-nonsense Chief (Albert Hall, the forgotten star of the supporting cast). The crew is made up of the teenaged Mr. Clean (Laurence Fishburn, a teenager himself when the film was made); Lance (Sam Bottoms), a surfer with a keenly developed taste for various drugs; and Chef (Frederic Forrest), a friendly guy from the Big Easy.
Their first stop along the way is with Col. Kilgore's First Air Cavalry. The famous helicopter attack on a village to the stirring strains of Wagner's “Ride of the Valkyries” contains some of the best aerial combat scenes ever caught on film. (Yes, that is R. Lee Ermey from Full Metal Jacket as a pilot.) After that long and grimly funny sequence, the film takes on a darker cast. Much of the rest of the action is set at night—note the way Coppola and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro paint the jungle with luminous blues and greens in the tiger scene—and even the daylight looks muted and gray. The nightmarish quality intensifies steadily through the Playmates show, the attack on the sampan, and the bridge under siege. Then Kurtz (Marlon Brando) finally appears and some of the air goes out of the balloon.
The stories about the film's troubled production schedule are perhaps the most famous in Hollywood history. Sets destroyed by a typhoon; one star (Harvey Keitel) fired; Sheen hired and suffering a heart attack; finances drying up and Coppola dipping into his own pocket; and, finally, Brando showing up for work looking mountainous for the first time in his career. Audiences at the time were not used to seeing him like that, and his appearance is still all wrong for this alleged “warrior-priest.”
To make matters worse, the script by Coppola and John Milius introduces a hyperactive photo-journalist (Dennis Hopper) who's as jittery as a squirrel on speed. It's never completely clear whether he is meant to be such a comic character. Whatever the filmmakers’ purpose, he is completely out of place. His nonsensical ramblings underline the weakness of the conclusion. Kurtz's ponderous pontifications never ring true either, and because of that, he and Willard do not connect. For the film to end properly, those two need to form some kind of relationship or understanding. As it is, they seldom appear in the same frame.
Attempting to compensate, Coppola empties his bag of director's tricks in the last reels and attempts to end the film on the same note of seriousness that it begins. He is at best only marginally successful, but that matters little. Compared to his other work of the period—Godfather II, The Conversation—Apocalypse Now is still a flawed masterpiece. If its facts and philosophy are suspect, the film somehow looks right, and the recurring images of water—bathing, washing, baptism, drowning—add a quality of redemption to an otherwise pointless war.
Though the film was considered a commercial failure in its initial release, it has developed a strong following over the years. To moviegoers and videophiles everywhere it is the Vietnam film. Why else would the Vietnamese owners of a new chain of restaurant/bars, with establishments in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), name their business “Apocalypse Now?”
Cast: Marlon Brando (Col. Walter E. Kurtz), Martin Sheen (Capt. Benjamin L. Willard), Robert Duvall (Lt. Col. Kilgore), Frederic Forrest (Chef), Sam Bottoms (Lance Johnson), Scott Glenn (Colby), Albert Hall (Chief Phillips), Laurence “Larry” Fishburne (Mr. Clean), Harrison Ford (Col. Lucas), G.D. Spradlin (The General), Dennis Hopper (Photographer), Cynthia Wood (Playmate of the Year), Colleen Camp (Playmate), Linda Carpenter (Playmate), Tom Mason (Supply sergeant), James Keane (Kilgore's gunner), Damien Leake (Kilgore's gunner), Jack Thibeau (Soldier in trench), R. Lee Ermey (Helicopter pilot), Vittorio Storaro (T.V. photographer), Francis Ford Coppola (T.V. director); Written by: John Milius, Michael Herr, Francis Ford Coppola; Cinematography by: Vittorio Storaro; Music by: Carmine Coppola. Producer: United Artists, Francis Ford Coppola. Awards: Academy Awards ‘79: Best Cinematography, Best Sound; British Academy Awards ‘79: Best Director (Coppola), Best Supporting Actor (Duvall); Cannes Film Festival ‘79: Best Film; Golden Globe Awards ‘80: Best Director (Coppola), Best Supporting Actor (Duvall), Best Score; National Society of Film Critics Awards ‘79: Best Supporting Actor (Forrest); American Film Institute (AFI) ‘98: Top 100; Nominations: Academy Awards ‘79: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction/Set Decoration, Best Director (Coppola), Best Film Editing, Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Duvall). Budget: 31.5M. Boxoffice: 78.8M. MPAA Rating: R. Running Time: 153 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta, LV, CD-I, Letterbox.