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Apocalypse Now
1979 - R - 153 Mins.
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| Director: Francis Ford Coppola | | Producer: Coppola, Gary Frederickson, Fred Roos, Tom Sternberg | | Written By: Coppola, John Milius, Michael Herr | | Starring: Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper |
| Review by: Jake Cremins |
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For some reason it completely escaped me, the first time I saw 'Apocalypse Now,' that it was a war movie. It took place during a war, yeah, but surely this film was too bizarre and cerebral, too insane to qualify as war movie material? Surely it deserved a category of its own? And yet, no. All of the ways in which this film is funny and horrifying, all of the ways in which it spirals down into the dark reaches of the mind and finds the creepy crawly things hiding inside, all of the ways in which it is gorgeous and confusing and maddening and bizarre--these all grow organically out of the fact that it takes place during the Vietnam War. This is a movie about confusion, brutality, madness and incompetence, about a truly incredible mess; it radiates its aura of insanity not in spite of the setting but because of it.
There is a sequence about halfway through the film, for instance, in which we get to see a Viet Cong base attacked by American troops in helicopters. It is a rousing piece of work, let me tell you: the 'copters fly over the surf, fire and bullets rain down, "The Ride of the Valkyries" barrels over the soundtrack, trumpets and opera singers and machine guns collide in an orgy of triumph, and the sequence flies high as one of the most simultaneously spectacular and appalling things in the movie. We watch houses being napalmed and soldiers running this way and that and ammunition flying through the air; we see families gunned down and soldiers on fire screaming in agony, and we're not amazed by the spectacle or stunned by the violence so much as we're wondering...all this for surfing?
For yes, the entire attack, planned by Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) with gleeful indifference, is done with the objective of clearing up some prime beachfront area for surfing. On another day, further down the river, Captain Willard risks life and limb to travel down a trench and find the officer in charge as soldiers fight and die left and right, only to have it dawn on him that no one's in charge and he's the first to notice. (Martin Sheen plays Willard as a man who has known combat and has been hardened by it, but who still manages to find reserves of disbelief: is this really happening? It is.) These sorts of events are normal day-to-day Vietnam stuff, we gather, and there is a way they could even be funny in a movie, if we didn't believe them so completely. The story reads like comedy punchlines, but it plays like a haymaker straight to the gut.
Willard has been sent on this journey through Vietnam to find Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who was once a decorated soldier but became erratic and has apparently gone insane. Kurtz will haunt most of the film first through a hackle-raising radio transmission we hear early on, and then through photographs and reports read by Willard, which show him disintegrating and turning into a deranged cult leader in the jungle...why? Such an air of mystery surrounds the current state of Kurtz's mind that the biggest mystery of all sits there unnoticed: why it is that he is being targeted for "termination with extreme prejudice," on a charge of murder that sounds like a sick joke, when there doesn't seem to be a sane person left within the country and everyone is slaughtering everyone else.
It would not be unexpected for a film about Vietnam to be anti-war. What *is* unexpected--what is brilliant, really--is the way Francis Ford Coppola has gone beyond the concept of war, gone beyond the concept of being against war, and delved right inside the brains of the characters to show us what war really and truly does to a person. From a stunning opening scene showing us the thoughts and images roiling through the head of Willard, to a finale showing us the same for Colonel Kurtz, Coppola finds astonishingly inventive and powerful ways to tell us what should really be obvious: that war, be it this one or any other, is one of mankind's single dumbest and most pointlessly cruel enduring ideas. It is easy to ignore editorials and rallies and flyers, but it is impossible to ignore something like 'Apocalypse Now,' which plunges heedlessly into the utter insanity of armed combat and comes out the other side.
I guess that's why this somehow didn't register as an out-and-out war film the first time I saw it. We don't see any coherent strategies, any plainly rousing battles, any political views or goals with proper names. There are no scenes where a character makes a noble sacrifice for his fellow soldiers, or his country, or anything. There isn't even a beautifully eloquent anti-war message on the order of 'All Quiet on the Western Front.' 'Apocalypse Now' is a movie as deranged as its title, one which dumps us in the middle of all this and almost dares us to make sense of it. It's really stunning--I mean that literally; this movie is like a blow to the head--and by the time Willard and Kurtz meet at last we've been through so much that it's possible to skip right to the end without realizing the purpose of the film's final scenes.
The scenes with Kurtz are stylistically bizarre, with a spectacularly freakish setting, heavily stylized lighting and ominous rumblings on the soundtrack; they are also colored by the fact that Kurtz is played by Marlon Brando, whose behavior on the set you've no doubt heard about already. It's unfortunate that all of that is so distracting, because the scenes with Kurtz are tremendously important: here, at last, is a character who is speaking the plain and unvarnished truth, practically right into the camera. Think about what he says--really think about it. Improvised or not, rambling as it may seem, there isn't a single wasted word. Willard was sent to kill Kurtz, not to learn from him, and everything leading up to Kurtz himself is telling us that there will be nothing to learn anyway. But when we meet him, what happens next is heartbreaking, brutal and, in its own way, perfect.
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