“I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor.
That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a
straight razor... and surviving.”
Francis Ford Coppola's
1979 Vietnam War film, Apocalypse Now, tells an intense, gruesome, convincing,
and disturbing story of one of America's worst wars. The film has a fantastic
story and characters while using stunning cinematography with magnificent sound
mixing. Apocalypse Now loosely is based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
It shares many meanings, themes, and even scenes from the book. “My film is not
about Vietnam. My film is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like.” Apocalypse
Now isn’t simply a war film. It is war. The film provides a symbolic
description on the weakening effects that war has on the human consciousness.
It’s the most daring films that was ever made and to simply call it a
masterpiece would be such an understatement. It’s one of the best films ever
made. Apocalypse Now is perfection.
The opening sequence
of the film shows a wide shot of a forest full of palm trees. It seems peaceful
until the viewer sees a helicopter fly by. The music in the background is of
the song The End by The Doors, which sets the mood of the film. The viewer then
sees napalm and shortly after the destruction of the quiet forest still in the
wide shot. As the destruction of the forest continues we see the film’s
protagonist overlapping with the imagery. It foreshadows what it to come. It’s
as if he is he having a flashback, but not really. It looks more like he’s longing to get back
into the absurdity of war.
As the scene continues
it show’s a regular shot of the protagonist’s face up close. The music stops
then it cuts to his point of view that is of the ceiling and fan. The fan is
spinning and it sounds like a helicopter rotor spinning. He has a gun under his
pillow and it looks like he had been drinking quite a bit of alcohol since his
glass is practically empty on the bedside table. It’s showing how unbalanced
this protagonist is. The viewer is then shown the protagonist’s setting, which
is a compressed motel room. His room is somewhat rather dark and when he gets
up to peak through the blinds it produces bars of light, which makes it look
like he is trapped there longing to be free as he expressed in his opening
lines.
“Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle.
When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be
nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said "yes" to a
divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could
think of was getting back into the jungle. I'm here a week now... waiting for a
mission... getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and
every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked
around the walls moved in a little tighter.”
This is a very great opening scene of as a result of war a
man is losing his sanity.
The protagonist we
are introduced to is Captain Benjamin L. Willard and his mission is to
"terminate... with extreme prejudice" Colonel Kurtz who has gone
AWOL deep within the Cambodian jungle. They tell Willard that Kurtz is
delusional and that he has a large group of devoted followers who worship him
as if he is a god. The mission to Willard seemed easy, he expected combat, but
the journey to Kurtz will test the limits of a man’s soul.
Willard teams up
with a small crew to journey down the river in a navy control boat to kill
Kurtz, but before that he had to pass through a coastal region that is heavy in
Viet Cong power. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” says Lieutenant
Colonel Bill Kilgore, which is one of the most famous lines ever said in a war
film. Kilgore is originally hesitant to call helicopters in for back up on
Willard’s mission, but he changes his mind when he learns that one of Willard’s
crew is a professional surfer and that the entrance to the river has good waves.
The Lieutenant loves to surf. As they are flying to the destination he plays
Richard Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ from the helicopters. He explains to
Willard’s crew, “It scares the hell out of the slopes. My boys love it.” He
takes on the entire beach with a napalm airstrike. Before the fighting is even
over he sends his men into the water to ride the waves because as he put it,
“Charlie don’t surf.”
Finally, they
embark down the river and Willard educates himself with a giant folder on
Kurtz. The folder delivers a lot of information on Kurtz and as Willard reads
it he provides his thoughts on the details. The viewer learns that Kurtz was a
highly respected Green Beret. He was an intelligent man, who would be
considered normal and was a family man. Then one day Kurtz surrendered to the
horrors of man and went down the path that Willard is going on. As the crew
descends deeper within the jungle, they all begin to lose what’s left of their
sanity. Willard’s decay is that like Kurtz’s.
There are three
main characters in the film: the jungle or nature in general, Captain Willard, and
the Colonel Kurtz. The jungle is swarming with life, yet there’s a stench of
death at the same time. The jungle plays an essential part on many of the
characters behaviors. In such a primal setting, it can distort the light and
darkness of the human soul. The atmosphere in the jungle is in the unknown,
which can cause fear. A man no matter how strong will become vulnerable with
his surrounding and once he does this he will uncover his darkness. Captain
Willard is not an individual; he is simply a tool that his officers use. He
doesn’t hesitate when they give him a mission to terminate a highly decorated
American soldier. He does whatever is asked of him. Kurtz himself points out
that Willard is blind in his obedience to the group. “You’re an errand boy,
sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.”
Colonel Kurtz is a
fascinating character. Kurtz originally was at one point in time a man of
standards and moralities, who is overflowing with philanthropic ideals.
Nevertheless, these ideals become consumed by the darkness of power and he
turns his back entirely on morality. He acts as if he is god and takes
control of a village in Cambodia. To preserve his power he uses barbaric
techniques in the village. Yet when Willard arrives Kurtz acts almost
childlike. Willard is put into a metal box in the extreme heat. When he wakes
up he sees a lot of children peeking through the holes and if you look closely Kurtz
is looking through one of the holes as if he’s one of the children. He then
opens the door to the metal box, sits down next to it, and somewhat talks about
the war. Instead of giving a detailed speech on how the war is meaningless he
simply reads an article from TIME that said the Americans were winning the
Vietnam War. Kurtz has seen atrocious things throughout his life; things that
only death can help escape such horrors. He knows Willard will kill him and he
wants him too, but he wants to pass down some knowledge to him before that
happens. To let him know the savage nature of war in hopes that Willard will deplore
it. So in a way not only was he once a warrior, a monster, god to the village,
but a deceiver. He didn’t resist death, but yielded to it.
The directing was truly remarkable here. The
70s was Francis Ford Coppola’s decade to shine with Godfather 1 & 2, The
Conversation, and his last larger-than-life film Apocalypse Now. Most directors
make the viewer have the sense that they’re in war while others show the
horrors of war. Coppola constructs the feelings of confusion, fear, and the
feeling of surprise. That’s something I’ve rarely experienced in a film. The
writing was of course astonishing too. The cinematography is so very beautiful.
Out of all the Vietnam War films Apocalypse Now is the most impressive,
frightening, and unsettling.
All the acting was
hair-raising. Marlon Brando was excellent as Colonel Kurtz. Marlon Brando has
always been a highly respected actor. He is transcendent in everything that he
is in. It’s indisputable that he is a genius when it comes to acting. It’s well
known that he was notoriously difficult to work with, yet his talent when
filmed was phenomenal. Seems like Brando knew what he was doing. His version of
Colonel Kurtz was quite profound. To me his performance as Kurtz is even more
memorable than that he gave in The Godfather. Martin Sheen provides a very
emotional performance and it’s probably the best performance of his career. Robert
Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore was a great supporting character
because of how irrational and preposterous he was. Willard’s crew: Sam Bottoms,
Albert Hall, Frederic Forest, and a very young Laurence Fishburne were great in
their roles. Dennis Hopper and Harrison
Ford’s minor characters were good. Harrison Ford playing the clumsy Colonel G.
Lucas (funny) and Dennis Hopper essentially playing well Dennis Hopper.
The film came out
before my time so I was unable to see it in the cinema, but when a director’s
cut (Apocalypse Now: Redux) was released in cinemas in 2001 I was immediately
there. It’s just a bit longer than the original and still as good. My only
gripe about it was the scene at the French plantation. It was very out of place
in my opinion. Other than that it was pure perfection. I highly recommend this
film.
5 out of 5
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