Apocalypse Now Movie

One of a cluster of late-1970s films about the Vietnam War, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now adapts the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness to depict the war as a descent into primal madness. Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen), already on the edge, is assigned to find and deal with AWOL Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), rumored to have set himself up in the Cambodian jungle as a local, lethal godhead. Along the way Willard encounters napalm and Wagner fan Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall), draftees who prefer to surf and do drugs, a USO Playboy Bunny show turned into a riot by the raucous soldiers, and a jumpy photographer (Dennis Hopper) telling wild, reverent tales about Kurtz. By the time Willard sees the heads mounted on stakes near Kurtz's compound, he knows Kurtz has gone over the deep end, but it is uncertain whether Willard himself now agrees with Kurtz's insane dictum to "Drop the Bomb. Exterminate them all." Coppola himself was not certain either, and he tried several different endings between the film's early rough-cut screenings for the press, the Palme d'Or-winning "work-in-progress" shown at Cannes, and the final 35 mm U.S. release (also the ending on the video cassette). The chaotic production also experienced shut-downs when a typhoon destroyed the set and star Sheen suffered a heart attack; the budget ballooned and Coppola covered the overages himself. These production headaches, which Coppola characterized as being like the Vietnam War itself, have been superbly captured in the documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. Despite the studio's fears and mixed reviews of the film's ending, Apocalypse Now became a substantial hit and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Duvall's psychotic Kilgore, and Best Screenplay. It won Oscars for sound and for Vittorio Storaro's cinematography. This hallucinatory, Wagnerian project has produced admirers and detractors of equal ardor; it resembles no other film ever made, and its nightmarish aura and polarized reception aptly reflect the tensions and confusions of the Vietnam era.

Filmmaking masterpieces are often products of fate rather than design, and while Francis Ford Coppola's fierce ambition to create a great work of art is obvious in Apocalypse Now, the same ambition often threatens to crush the picture under its own weight. Apocalypse Now is an elaborate but often haphazard construction that starts to run out of gas at the three-quarter point without delivering a satisfying ending, and Marlon Brando's often lackadaisical performance as Col. Kurtz never lives up to the massive buildup the story gives it. And yet there are moments as powerful as anything Coppola (or anyone else) ever put on screen, and there are enough of them to make the film a flawed but unmistakable triumph. The air attack set to Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyries and the Battle at Do Lung Bridge capture the terror and madness of war as few films have, and the further Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) and his men travel up the river, the deeper they are drawn into a surreal nightmare where right and wrong, danger and security, past and present, have begun to blur. Coppola also drew a superb performance from Martin Sheen as Willard; a fine but inconsistent actor, Sheen rarely had a role as good as Willard, and he rises to the occasion. There's also excellent supporting work from Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, G.D. Spradlin, and particularly Albert Hall, who, as Chief, has the burden of being the sole unambiguously disciplined and dedicated soldier in the film. Coppola was famously quoted as saying "This isn't a film about Viet Nam, this film Viet Nam." If, like that war, Apocalypse Now doesn't quite achieve its objective, it comes close enough to stand as Coppola's last great film.