Apocalypse Now: The 1979 Cut (1979) + Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

×

Apocalypse Now: The 1979 Cut (1979) + Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Close

×

Apocalypse Now: The 1979 Cut (1979) + Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Close

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 is 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.

Mark Deming, Rovi

×

Apocalypse Now: The 1979 Cut (1979) + Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Close

In his book The Films of My Life, the French director Francois Truffaut makes a curious statement. He used to believe, he says, that a successful film had to simultaneously express "an idea of the world and an idea of cinema." But now, he writes: "I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse."

It may seem strange to begin a review of Francis Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" with those words, but consider them for a moment and they apply perfectly to this sprawling film. The critics who have rejected Coppola's film mostly did so on Truffaut's earlier grounds: They have arguments with the ideas about the world and the war in "Apocalypse Now," or they disagree with the very idea of a film that cost $31 million to make and was then carted all over the world by a filmmaker still uncertain whether he has the right ending.

×

Apocalypse Now: The 1979 Cut (1979) + Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Close

That "other" film on the screen – the one we debate because of its ideas, not its images – is the one that has caused so much controversy about "Apocalypse Now." We have all read that Coppola took as his inspiration the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness, and that he turned Conrad's journey up the Congo into a metaphor for another journey up a jungle river, into the heart of the Vietnam War. We've all read Coppola's grandiose statements (the most memorable: "This isn't a film about Vietnam. This film is Vietnam."). We've heard that Marlon Brando was paid $1 million for his closing scenes, and that Coppola gambled his personal fortune to finish the film, and, heaven help us, we've even read a journal by the director's wife in which she discloses her husband's ravings and infidelities.

But all such considerations are far from the reasons why "Apocalypse Now" is a good and important film – a masterpiece, I believe. Years and years from now, when Coppola's budget and his problems have long been forgotten, "Apocalypse" will still stand, I think, as a grand and grave and insanely inspired gesture of filmmaking – of moments that are operatic in their style and scope, and of other moments so silent we can almost hear the director thinking to himself.

×

Apocalypse Now: The 1979 Cut (1979) + Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Close

I should at this moment make a confession: I am not particularly interested in the "ideas" in Coppola's film. Critics of "Apocalypse" have said that Coppola was foolish to translate Heart of Darkness, that Conrad's vision had nothing to do with Vietnam, and that Coppola was simply borrowing Conrad's cultural respectability to give a gloss to his own disorganized ideas. The same objection was made to the hiring of Brando: Coppola was hoping, according to this version, that the presence of Brando as an icon would distract us from the emptiness of what he's given to say.

Such criticisms are made by people who indeed are plumbing "Apocalypse Now" for its ideas, and who are as misguided as the veteran Vietnam correspondents who breathlessly reported, some months ago, that "The Deer Hunter" was not "accurate." What idea or philosophy could we expect to find in "Apocalypse Now" – and what good would it really do, at this point after the Vietnam tragedy, if Brando's closing speeches did have the "answers"? Like all great works of art about war, "Apocalypse Now" essentially contains only one idea or message, the not-especially-enlightening observation that war is hell. We do not go to see Coppola's movie for that insight – something Coppola, but not some of his critics, knows well.

×

Apocalypse Now: The 1979 Cut (1979) + Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Close

Coppola also well knows (and demonstrated in the "Godfather" films) that movies aren't especially good at dealing with abstract ideas – for those you'd be better off turning to the written word – but they are superb for presenting moods and feelings, the look of a battle, the expression on a face, the mood of a country. "Apocalypse Now" achieves greatness not by analyzing our "experience in Vietnam," but by re-creating, in characters and images, something of that experience.

An example: The scene in which Robert Duvall, as a crazed lieutenant colonel, leads his troops in a helicopter assault on a village is, quite simply, the best movie battle scene ever filmed. It's simultaneously numbing, depressing, and exhilarating: As the rockets jar from the helicopters and spring through the air, we're elated like kids for a half-second, until the reality of the consequences sinks in.

×

Apocalypse Now: The 1979 Cut (1979) + Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Close

Another wrenching scene – in which the crew of Martin Sheen's Navy patrol boat massacres the Vietnamese peasants in a small boat – happens with such sudden, fierce, senseless violence that it forces us to understand for the first time how such things could happen.

Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" is filled with moments like that, and the narrative device of the journey upriver is as convenient for him as it was for Conrad. That's really why he uses it, and not because of literary cross-references for graduate students to catalog. He takes the journey, strings episodes along it, leads us at last to Brando's awesome, stinking hideaway … and then finds, so we've all heard, that he doesn't have an ending. Well, Coppola doesn't have an ending, if we or he expected the closing scenes to pull everything together and make sense of it. Nobody should have been surprised. "Apocalypse Now" doesn't tell any kind of a conventional story, doesn't have a thought-out message for us about Vietnam, has no answers, and thus needs no ending.

×

Apocalypse Now: The 1979 Cut (1979) + Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Close

The way the film ends now, with Brando's fuzzy, brooding monologues and the final violence, feels much more satisfactory than any conventional ending possibly could.

What's great in the film, and what will make it live for many years and speak to many audiences, is what Coppola achieves on the levels Truffaut was discussing: the moments of agony and joy in making cinema. Some of those moments come at the same time; remember again the helicopter assault and its unsettling juxtaposition of horror and exhilaration. Remember the weird beauty of the massed helicopters lifting over the trees in the long shot, and the insane power of Wagner's music, played loudly during the attack, and you feel what Coppola was getting at: Those moments as common in life as art, when the whole huge grand mystery of the world, so terrible, so beautiful, seems to hang in the balance.

Roger Ebert, Chickago Sun-Times

×

Apocalypse Now: The 1979 Cut (1979) + Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Close

Webster's Dictionary defines the word "epic" as something that extends "beyond the usual or ordinary, especially in size or scope." Hollywood epics, especially war epics, have lost touch with scope and have been mostly reduced to bloated, overindulgent claptrap. Recent films like Pearl Harbor and Saving Private Ryan, for all the filmmakers may have been trying to accomplish, have given us not much more than efforts that - to paraphrase Shakespeare - are full of sound and fury and signify nothing. When Francis Ford Coppola decided to go back into the editing room to re-cut his masterpiece, Apocalypse Now, he may not have intended to remind the world what a true epic is. But he has. The result, entitled Apocalypse Now Redux, is a richer, more frightening story of grander proportions than the original edit. With the addition of about 50 minutes of new footage, Redux has come that much closer to showing its audience what the Vietnam War was like.

×

Apocalypse Now: The 1979 Cut (1979) + Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Close

The original version of Apocalypse Now, released in 1979, was Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness. In the film, Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) is given a special mission to terminate a rogue colonel who has built an armed fort somewhere in Cambodia. A misfit crew of Navy soldiers is enlisted to escort Willard north to his destination, given no knowledge of where that is exactly. They encounter surreal characters and situations along the way before reaching the fort of Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), the most surreal of them all.

×

Apocalypse Now: The 1979 Cut (1979) + Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Close

The most remarkable aspect of Apocalypse Now Redux is its reshaping of the story. The original version kept Willard's mission at the forefront; it was the driving force of the film. In Redux, with a running time of almost three hours and twenty minutes, the audience gets more of a sense of "the horror" that Kurtz speaks about at the end. It plays less like Heart of Darkness than The Odyssey; the mission, to Willard and the audience alike, becomes second to the immediate surroundings and what they have in store. The revamped Cyclops is half-crazed, surfing-obsessed Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall in one of the all-time great scene stealing performances), whose idea of a good time is blasting Wagner from loudspeakers during a helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village. A lighter ending has been added to this scene which has Willard stealing one of Kilgore's beloved surfboards. The Sirens come in the form of Playboy bunnies; in one of the newly added scenes, Willard provides diesel fuel for the stranded bunnies in exchange for sex with his crew. And in what encompasses the largest part of the new footage, the crew comes across a hidden plantation owned by a French family, a variation on Homer's Lotus-Eaters. During a dinner scene, Hubert, the patriarch (Christian Marquand), expresses to Willard the French's distaste in the United States' involvement in Vietnam, saying that they "fight for the biggest nothing of all."

×

Apocalypse Now: The 1979 Cut (1979) + Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Close

Other notable new scenes include one in Kurtz's camp, where he reads a Time magazine article to the imprisoned Willard; 1979 was too soon after the end of the Vietnam War to push the point that the media was lying to the public about it. Another scene in which Mr. Clean (a 14-year old Laurence Fishburne) tells the story of an officer who shot a Vietcong soldier over a Playboy magazine. With the addition of this monologue, Coppola gives us an early glimpse of the versatile actor that Fishburne would become.

Apocalypse Now Redux is a rare example of a director's cut being truly superior to the original. On the Redux official website, Coppola states that his impetus to re-edit his already acknowledged classic was having seen it on TV in the past couple of years and feeling that "the audience had caught up to it." With Walter Murch, Oscar winner for the original's sound, Coppola re-edited the film from scratch, as opposed to the more popular (and time-saving) process of simply sticking the cut footage back into the film. The extra care taken in the editing is evident as all of the new footage blends so seamlessly with everything else that someone unfamiliar with the original would not even notice.

All said and done, Apocalypse Now Redux is the standard by which all other war films should be measured. It becomes an endurance test, due to both the length and the content. In 1979, at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival (where it would win the Palme D'Or), Coppola said that Apocalypse Now wasn't about Vietnam, it was Vietnam. If the original was Vietnam, then surely Apocalypse Now Redux, a true epic, must be Hell itself.

Alexander Chancey, eFilmCritic.com

×

Apocalypse Now: The 1979 Cut (1979) + Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Close