Occasionally, I enjoy watching movie reaction channels on YouTube because it allows me to revisit a film that I am very familiar with in a more time-friendly way, and it also allows me to see it through the eyes of someone who has never seen it before. Both are appealing to me because my time is precious, and I have very few people in my life who I can just sit down with and show them an important movie and watch their reaction to it. For me, this is the next best thing. What often impresses me the most with this kind of viewing is that these content creators often are just as taken in with a classic film as those who first experienced them years, even decades, ago. A truly great film transcends generations and can have a powerful effect on mood, on perspective, on our concept of the world around us, and our own history; it doesn’t need for us to have experienced the events depicted to affect us deep down. The best of these can even change our perspective on the world around us. Seeing that happen in the eyes of a new viewer can be very rewarding.
Watching a movie in this form is no substitute for seeing it in full, and if you have never seen Apocalypse Now, watching a greatest hits of the film is not the way to go. Neither is watching the film in any form other than its original theatrical release, at least not for a first watch. There are four versions that I am aware of, and I have watched each of these at some point in the past. There are merits to each of them, but for a first viewing, the theatrical version is the best. It also happens to be the version that was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, so that is the version I rewatched today for this review. I also understand that this film has been analyzed to death in the nearly fifty years since it first hit theaters, and so I will only be hitting the surface with this limited format. For a more detailed analysis, there are books and documentaries that delve much further in, including a brilliant one made during the filming that is available on most releases of the movie on physical media platforms.
Apocalypse Now was originally going to be a project directed by George Lucas. Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola were good friends going back to college days when Coppola helped George get his student film THX-1138 produced and released. Co-writer John Milius looked at the novella Heart of Darkness, a story set on the Congo in the 19th century, and saw potential to adapt it into a Vietnam setting. Coppola was to produce with Lucas helming it. Milius had wanted to serve in the war but was rejected because of his asthma, frustrating him. Instead, he chose to write about the war, and Heart of Darknessgave him that in-road into the subject.
Warner Bros.-Seven Arts acquired the screenplay in 1969, but held off on it, feeling that sentiment for the war was very negative and they feared the movie would stoke those fires and fail to be profitable. Meanwhile, Lucas was expanding THX-1138 into a feature film and had started on a little project he would eventually title Star Wars. That, coupled with American Graffiti, wore him down and he eventually stepped away from Apocalypse Now, leaving Coppola to step in and take the director’s reins. Coppola, who had just had tremendous success with The Godfather and its sequel, was flush with money and elected to produce the film himself, sidestepping the hassles of dealing with studio interference. This would ultimately make the production of the film a nightmare on the level of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Production delays, bad weather, deals with the military to gain use of aircraft, government interference, and jungle location shootings caused principal photography to take eight months, doubling the budget of the film. Editing added even more challenges and the film was now nearly twenty million dollars over budget.
When it finally did hit theaters, it received mixed reviews. Not everyone bought into what Coppola was trying to do with his epic. The film was not an action adventure war film but a psychological dive off the deep end, an emotional and physical journey into Dante’s levels of hell as experienced by U.S. Army Captain Willard (Martin Sheen). We are introduced to Willard as he is going through his own kind of burnout, having returned to Vietnam for a second tour of duty because he no longer feels at home in the States. All he can think about is returning to the jungle and this has led to a divorce. His introduction is narrated by The Doors’ hauntingly melodic The End and juxtaposed with images of jungles set to flame and his own alcohol-fueled delirium.
In this state, he is summoned to I Field Force Headquarters in Nha Trang, where he is given an assignment. He is to travel up the Nùng River into eastern Cambodia and find U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who is waging a brutal war against the North Vietnamese Army, Viet Cong, and Khmer Rouge forces without permission from his superiors. Willard’s orders are to find Kurtz and terminate his command… with extreme prejudice. The film follows Willard and his small group of men as they make that journey and eventually encounter Kurtz.
We are often told that it’s the journey, not the destination, that makes for a great story. In this case, it is actually both. This film wouldn’t work without both parts being compelling. They both rely on the elements of duality, a theme that Coppola keeps going back to throughout the movie. We learn that Kurtz was a highly gifted soldier that was being groomed for greatness but elected the post that he has in Vietnam instead. Something along the way snapped in him, and he is leading a group of followers like he is a messiah. We don’t get a clear picture as to how or why he snapped, but we see a great deal of the strain of the war as experienced by Willard, which clues us into part of that picture. We also have that wonderful montage that opens the film where we experience Willard’s own breakdown. Reportedly, Martin Sheen was just as drunk as the character he was portraying at the time, which led to an accident on set that made it into the final cut.
The journey up the river gives further parallels. First, we are dropped into a combat situation involving Lieutenant Colonel William Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who has lost touch with the realities of casualties of war (his name is a less-than-subtle comment on that) and is intent on carving out pieces of Vietnam to mold into a little piece of back home. He is obsessed with surfing to the point that during a military strike, he is more concerned with his men getting some waves than the ongoing gunfire around him. This is truly a bizarre moment in the film, and we get a glimpse of what the war has done for a man like Kilgore. The humanity is gone, and the obsession is all that is left. He gets the iconic line in the film: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” and we can tell he isn’t saying that ironically.
A later sequence serves to portray the absurdity of the U.S. Government trying to appease the soldiers by giving them a “taste of home” by bringing in a handful of Playboy models to entertain the troops. This quickly descends into chaos as the men storm the stage and try to overtake the helicopter with the women on board. The men are demonstrating that they would much rather be home than where they are currently at.
This is a film about emotions; raw, unadulterated emotions. That comes to a head when Willard and his surviving men finally arrive at Kurtz’s camp and are greeted by his followers, including a crazy photographer played by Dennis Hopper. We get the sense that Willard could very easily get seduced into Kurtz’s camp just as others have already. During this final segment, we finally get Marlon Brando on screen, and it doesn’t disappoint. He is played mostly in shadows, coming in and out of the darkness as he goes on and on about his position and his mission here. Much has been said about how Coppola supposedly had very different ideas about how this film should end, but what he ultimately settled on is the only way it really could have ended. Watching it, even knowing where it is headed, it is impossible not to be affected emotionally by the words, the visuals, the imagery all around Willard.
Apocalypse Now is an absolute masterpiece of cinema, a daring dive into the psyche of those traumatized by their experiences in Vietnam. It’s a tough film to watch at times, but it is also one that helps us understand what can drive a person to do the things we would look at as pure savagery. This is not a film meant to raise your spirits or get you on the side of our troops in Vietnam. This is a film meant to appall you at times and give you a bit of sympathy for our fighting young men. We are haunted by a moment where Mr. Clean (a fourteen-year-old Larry Fishburn) is killed in an attack on the boat while a recording of his mother continues to play, wishing him luck in avoiding the bullets, plays over him. Imagery like that haunts this film and drives the emotional soul of this movie in ways that even the amazing Oliver Stone picture Platoon doesn’t quite achieve.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Roos, Gary Frederickson, and Tom Sternberg
Best Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Robert Duvall
Best Writing - Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium: John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola
Best Art Direction: Dean Tavoularis, Angelo P. Graham, and George R. Nelson
Best Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro (won)
Best Film Editing: Richard Marks, Walter Murch, Gerald B. Greenberg, and Lisa Fruchtman
Best Sound: Walter Murch, Mark Berger, Richard Beggs, and Nat Boxer (won)
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Release Date: August 15, 1979
Running Time: 153 minutes
Rated R
Starring: Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Larry Fishburn, and Dennis Hopper
Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
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