This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas were closed and I had to review something and now I can't stop until I finish.
(R) ★★★★★
Director: Frances Ford Coppola.
Cast: Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Marlon Brando, Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms, Larry Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, G. D. Spradlin, Jerry Ziesmer, Harrison Ford.
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| "I took this much drugs." |
The first time I saw Apocalypse Now, I was 18 and had just started a writing course. Screenwriting lessons only ran for two hours, so our teacher, unable to fit Apocalypse Now into the allotted time frame, instead screened Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, perhaps hoping it would inspire us to go out and hire the film from a video shop on our own time. Either that, or he was trying to scare us off making movies.
You should totally watch Hearts Of Darkness by the way. It's one of the greatest docos of all time.
The next day, one of my classmates and I skipped class, rented a copy of Apocalypse Now on VHS (I'm really showing my age here), and once we were back at my mate's place, we drew the curtains and pressed "play".
Two and a half hours later, we were too afraid to open the curtains. The world had changed. It suddenly seemed more savage, more dangerous, and more insane. Eventually, I walked home in a wary haze, grappling with what I'd seen. The horror....
Since that day Apocalypse Now has been burnt into my memory. But re-watching it for this project presented me with a conundrum I hadn't had first time around: which version should I watch - the 1979 original, 2001's Redux, or 2019's Final Cut? Hell, I could even watch the five-hour-long first assembly if I really wanted to.
(In case you're wondering, here's a full break-down of the differences between the original and Redux, and between Redux and Final Cut.)
I went with the original, partly to see if it could have the same impact, all these years later, but also because nothing I've read has convinced me the re-cuts improve on an already-perfect film (maybe I'll get around to them one day).
Because Apocalypse Now is perfect. The film is indelibly linked to its famously troubled production, which you can learn about here, here, here and here, but setting that aside, it's an astounding piece of work. That it was made under such duress only makes it all the more remarkable.
The film holds a dirty mirror up to the Vietnam War, which had finished less than a year before Coppola and his crew began arriving in the Philippines to start filming. But what the mirror reflects back is a surreal distortion that, perversely, makes it one of the most realistic war films of all time. The absurdity and insanity of war - not just Vietnam, but all wars - is painted in acid-soaked splatters of sudden violence, of creeping madness, of primitive ridiculousness. And in a metaphorical and lyrical sense it's the absolute truth, despite none of it ever actually happening.
Taking Joseph Conrad's novella Heart Of Darkness and transplanting its up-river journey from late 19th-century Congo to 1970s 'Nam is a stroke of genius courtesy of screenwriter John Milius. His script went through many variations on its way to the screen, and it's hard to be sure what went into the jungle on paper and what was conjured there, but the story and dialogue are surprisingly sharp for such a beleaguered project. Coppola dithered on what the ending should be, but found something with a depth and power that matched everything that had preceded it.
So much of Apocalypse Now is memorable, including that ending, but the stuff around the most iconic moments is just as amazing. The use of The Doors' The End and Wagner's Ride Of The Valkyries is classic, but the score itself (done by Coppola and his father Carmine) is wonderful - an unnerving, retro-futurist soundscape full of fat ominous synths, chopper oscillations, and the occasional haunting flute. Duvall's Kilgore has some of cinema's most memorable lines - "I love the smell napalm in the morning", "Charlie don't surf" - but the way he says "some day, this war's gonna end" with dangling ambiguity is supremely under-rated. And the introduction to Sheen's Willard, where a for-real drunk Sheen for-real cuts his hand by punching a mirror is cool, but the rest of his performance as a bewildered just-passing-through protagonist is gold.
What makes the film so effective is that it ruminates on war and insanity and never separates the two. It uses its absurdities to demonstrate the insanity of war, and it uses war to demonstrate the insanity of humans. The film's success thrives on these linked notions and never stops showing us how crazy everything and everyone is. From waterskiing to The Rolling Stones behind a patrol boat to surfing during a battle, from holding a church service against a backdrop of explosions and a flying cow to hosting a Playboy bunny cabaret show in a warzone, from setting your comrades boat on fire to wandering through a shootout with a puppy while you've got a headful of acid; it's all fucking crazy, man. And yet somehow, it never feels like a bridge too far, logic-wise.
Willard is crazy. Kurtz is crazy. Kilgore is crazy. Dennis Hopper was crazy and so's his character. Just about everyone encountered along the way is crazy, just in varying degrees. And the performances match that. Sheen is subdued for the most part, but carries a powder keg beneath the surface, and for a glimmering, wondering moment, we see him contemplate becoming Kurtz, and it's a masterful piece of acting and editing. Brando plays Kurtz like a shadowy saint awaiting judgement. Duvall is brilliant as military might and the American way personified. The boat crew - Forrest, Hall, Bottoms and Fishburne - all add colour and depth to the journey. Deaths still hit hard, as does the strain and stress. Everyone acquits themselves beautifully.
The real hero is, of course, Coppola. Apocalypse Now capped off an amazing four-film run that included the first two Godfathers and The Conversation, and he would never make anything in the same league again. It's as if he burnt himself out, pouring everything he had into those four films, culminating in this film's brain-breaking 238-day shoot.
But his skills here are impossible to ignore. Matching The Door's The End to shots of helicopters and a burning jungle, then layering that image with Willard, and a ceiling fan, spinning like a chopper blade, as Willard intones his broken-man monologue... it's masterful stuff. It's high art. And it's only the beginning.
Along with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Coppola summons a nightmare in the jungle. It encompasses bravura battle sequences (that are still impressive to this day), out-of-nowhere bloody violence, hallucinogenic trippiness, and then a finale that is confronting (you don't easily forget that poor water buffalo) and narratively satisfying. The shot of Willard rising up out of the swamp is one of the greatest shots of all time, but it appears among two and a half hours of amazing shots.
Apocalypse Now's brilliance lies in its ability to use the fantastical to represent reality in a way only cinema can do. By winding a myth-like script through a modern setting, it pulls apart the truth and hypocrisy of war, scratching at the insanity underneath to create something hallucinatory yet true. Masterfully shot and meticulously edited, it is a mammoth of a movie with nary a hair out of place.
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