Apocalypse Now (1979)

Official trailer

Apocalypse Now is the Francis Ford Coppola Vietnam War epic that became a much-discussed production in American cinema history.

Coppola directed and co-wrote with John Milius and (uncredited) Michael Herr, loosely adapting Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Martin Sheen plays Captain Benjamin Willard, a U.S. Army Special Forces officer sent on a covert mission up the Nung River into Cambodia. Marlon Brando plays Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, the rogue Green Beret officer Willard has been ordered to assassinate.

Robert Duvall plays Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, the cavalry commander who runs the helicopter assault in act one.

Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, and a fourteen-year-old Laurence Fishburne play Willard’s PBR crew. Dennis Hopper plays the unnamed American photojournalist at Kurtz’s compound. The plot follows Willard’s journey upriver and his eventual encounter with Kurtz.

Few films get under my skin the way this one does. The helicopters and the Wagner, the flares over Do Lung, the long slide upriver, and the film plays like a fever I’m watching a man catch. I think it’s the most frightening war film Hollywood ever made. My reservation waits at the end of the river, with Brando.

The film made approximately one hundred and fifty million dollars worldwide on a thirty-one million dollar budget.

The production was famously catastrophic. A typhoon destroyed sets. Martin Sheen had a heart attack on location. Brando arrived overweight and unprepared. The shoot ran sixteen months instead of the planned six weeks. The film won two Academy Awards (Cinematography and Sound) and received six more nominations. Later decades have reframed the film as one of the major works of American cinema. The 2001 Apocalypse Now Redux added forty-nine minutes of restored footage.

The 2019 Final Cut runs 182 minutes and is Coppola’s preferred version.

The Journey Structure

The film inherits Heart of Darkness’s river journey as both physical structure and metaphor. Willard moves up the Nung from coastal Vietnam into Cambodia. Each stop is an escalation of derangement. The first stop is Kilgore’s cavalry assault on a coastal village. The second is the playboy USO show.

The third is the Do Lung Bridge. The fourth is the Kurtz compound itself. The audience experiences the war’s progressive moral collapse through Willard’s progression upstream.

The structure is one of the cleanest dramatic engines in American cinema.

The audience knows from the opening voiceover that Willard will reach Kurtz and that the encounter will be the film’s resolution. The interim sequences build toward the audience’s understanding of what Vietnam was, of what command structures permitted, and of what kind of man Kurtz had to be. Each stop adds another layer. The cumulative weight is the film’s actual argument.

What I admire most is that the film tells you the ending in the opening minutes and still makes the trip unbearable. Each stop is worse than the last, and by the time the boat reaches the compound I feel like I’ve been dragged there.

The Helicopter Assault

The Kilgore helicopter assault sequence is the film’s most-quoted individual passage and a much-imitated set piece in war cinema. Robert Duvall’s Kilgore leads the Air Cavalry’s morning attack on a coastal Viet Cong village. The helicopters approach with Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” broadcast through speakers mounted on the aircraft. The attack destroys the village. Kilgore surfs the beach during the firefight. Kilgore requests napalm. Kilgore delivers the “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” line.

The sequence works because every component is staged with sustained craft. The helicopter aerial photography by Vittorio Storaro is exceptional. The Wagner integration uses the music as character (Kilgore plays it because he wants to scare them). The Duvall performance is so committed that Kilgore became a permanent reference for charismatic military mania. The napalm reveals come through specific staging that lets the audience absorb the obscenity gradually. The sequence is the film’s clearest demonstration of how war can be presented as at once spectacular and morally rancid.

I think this is the finest battle sequence I know, and it disgusts me in the same breath. I’m thrilled by the helicopters coming in with the music blaring, and then Kilgore wants to surf, and I’m ashamed of being thrilled. Duvall makes that shift happen in me without a single speech.

The Brando Problem

Marlon Brando’s Kurtz is the film’s most-debated element. Brando arrived on location overweight, unprepared, and unhappy. He hadn’t read the source novel or memorized lines, and he demanded that his scenes be largely shot in shadow. The performance that emerged consists of extended improvised monologues delivered while Brando’s bald head emerges from darkness. The improvisations are sometimes deep and sometimes incoherent. The film embraces both.

The Kurtz character is supposed to be a man who has seen too much and rejected the limits of conventional military morality.

Brando’s preparation problems became the performance’s actual subject. Kurtz speaks in fragments. He recites T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” and describes the moment he understood. The audience doesn’t learn what he understood, only that he believes he’s understood it. Whether Brando is performing Kurtz or performing his own confusion about what Kurtz is supposed to be remains disputed. Coppola has acknowledged the dispute.

The character works because the ambiguity matches the script’s actual argument about war and moral collapse.

I’m split on him, and that split is most of why this is a 9. The shadowed head and the Eliot recitation give me chills, and then a monologue drifts off into nothing and I can feel Brando stalling. I’d have cut some of the rambling and kept the dark.

Does Apocalypse Now still hold up?

9/10. Coppola, Storaro, Sheen, Duvall and the river structure all deserve their place in the canon, and the helicopter attack and the Do Lung Bridge are scenes I’d put against anything in war cinema. Brando’s Kurtz is the most-debated element and the reason it isn’t a 10 for me, with Hopper’s photojournalist as the other drag on the final act. The achievements outweigh both. Watch the 1979 theatrical cut first. The Final Cut adds material that some viewers prefer.

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