![]() ![]() APOCALYPSE NOW remains a majestic explosion of pure cinema. That's right - one of the best movies ever made just got better., Entertainment Weekly. But his mute presence is potent enough.USA Today - ".The film now seems mellower and - thanks in part to the most vibrant-looking prints in its 22-year history - revitalized." - 4 out of 4 stars, Total Film - APOCALYPSE NOW is a reassuring rarityA genuinely stronger film. Each time I watch this film, though, I always regret, just a little, that Willard hasn’t a bit more to say for himself, especially as he has this avowed need to “confront” Kurtz. Sheen, meanwhile, is strong and charismatic as Willard, becoming more fascinated and awestruck by Kurtz’s reputation the closer he gets to his quarry. But his unmistakably adenoidal whispered aria about tribespeople cutting off their children’s arms rather than submit to inoculation always delivers a sickening blow. ![]() It is presumably this character who has painted the graffiti: “Our Motto: Apocalypse Now” on to a nearby rock.īrando’s charisma sells the climactic scenes with Willard without his presence, the literary musings would be a little callow. Willard and his men carry on upriver: Tyrone (Laurence Fishburne), Lance (Sam Bottoms), Chef (Frederic Forrest), and Chief (Albert Hall) - until Willard arrives at the sinister jungle clearing itself, with corpses hung everywhere they encounter Kurtz’s acolyte: the crazy, gurning photojournalist ( Dennis Hopper) – a countercultural parody, like a cross between Charles Manson (whose fate Willard had noticed in a newspaper headline) and one of Manson’s followers. It is one of the most staggering war-movie set pieces in history. Photograph: Allstar/United ArtistsĪnd so Willard sets off into the Boschian chaos, encountering Kilgore, who gives him diversionary air cover to get his boat to the river’s strategic entry point with his bizarre “Air Mobile” helicopter cavalry attack blaring Wagner from the sound-system. He is rumoured to be revered as a chieftain, or worshipped as a pagan god, and lost his mind through having been vouchsafed some terrible vision of humanity in the jungle itself.Įxtraordinary … Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. There he is expected to track down the renegade Colonel Walter Kurtz – an extraordinary cameo by Marlon Brando – and “terminate his command”, because this once brilliant officer has, as the Brit imperialist used to say, gone native, and become drunk with power, ordering executions. He is tasked by hatchet-faced intelligence chiefs with travelling with a small crew upriver into Viet Cong territory and into Cambodia. ![]() Martin Sheen plays Captain Benjamin Willard, a troubled officer, recovering – or not recovering – from a breakdown caused by his last tour of Vietnam. He has removed some of the “Playmate” sequences that were in his 202-minute “Redux” edition from 2001, but this cut retains the extended “dinner party” scene with French planters in the jungle, like an encounter with angry imperial ghosts. Interestingly, this does not mean simply including everything he shot. Now Apocalypse Now has resurfaced for its 40th-anniversary in what Coppola is calling his definitive final cut. (The nearest that Vietnamese people get to actual importance in Apocalypse Now is the four South Vietnamese intelligence officers, executed by Col Kurtz as Communist spies, whose ID cards we briefly see.) Like Lawrence of Arabia, moreover, this is a film without women – or mostly. The production involved a filming expedition in the Philippines that felt hardly less colossal and traumatic to the participants than the actual war, though it became commonplace in Hollywood’s Vietnam for the anguish of American soldiers, not that of the Vietnamese people themselves, to be seen as important. It was famously an ordeal for all concerned. It was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, Herr’s own Vietnam reportage-memoir Dispatches and maybe at one further remove by Rudyard Kipling’s lines about the US taking up the white man’s imperial burden. In fact, when Francis Ford Coppola’s grandiose epic masterpiece Apocalypse Now was first unveiled in 1979, the Vietnam war had only ended four years previously, and the succeeding war between Vietnam and Cambodia (where the film’s climax is set) was in full swing.Ĭoppola’s bad trip into south-east Asia was co-written by John Milius with narration written by Michael Herr. ‘S omeday this war’s gonna end,” is the sage comment from surf-crazed Wagner enthusiast Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, brusquely played by Robert Duvall. ![]()
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