Apocalypse Now is based loosely on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, with which it shares many similar thematic concerns about the tensions between civilization and savagery and a metaphoric use of an upriver journey into the darkness of the jungle as a metaphor for a descent into the darkness of human violence. Coppola and cowriter John Milius move the narrative out of 19th-century Africa and into the quagmire of the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. The ultimate destination of the journey is somewhere in Cambodia, where a decorated Green Beret officer named Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) has apparently gone insane and marshaled an army of devoted followers who will take his every order without question.

Because Kurtz is operating with “unsound methods”--an ironic statement if ever there was one--the military sends Capt. Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) on a secret mission to “terminate Kurtz’s command.” In other words, Willard is being sent to assassinate one of his fellow officers. Throughout the journey, Willard pages through Kurtz’s dossier, trying get a handle on him, trying to understand why, in all the madness surrounding them, the top brass would fear this particular man.

Clearly, madness is the film’s organizing principle. As a journey, its destination is a place of complete insanity, with Kurtz as a despot-philosopher ruling over a savage army. The final portion of the film at Kurtz’s compound turns it explicitly into a horror movie (a literalization of “The horror! The horror!”), with corpses, severed limbs, and disembodied heads scattered throughout the frame, constantly reminding us of death and desecration. Each step of Willard’s journey up the river is a step deeper into this chaos.

The irony, of course, is that his journey begins in the madness of the Vietnam War, which had an insanity all its own. Willard’s first contact is a deranged, gun-crazy lieutenant colonel named Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who thinks little of decimating a Vietnamese village because the beaches around it have waves ideal for surfing. The question becomes, then, why is Kurtz insane by military standards but Kilgore is not? Are the severed body parts adorning Kurtz’s compound any worse that the bodies mutilated by Kilgore’s aerial attack?

From there, Willard’s upriver journey grows increasingly surreal. At one point, he and his crew come across a USO performance in which Playboy bunnies strut their stuff on a stage to the increasingly uncontrollable enjoyment of hundreds of soldiers, showing that even in the most hellish conditions men can still obsess over sex. At another point, they reach the last U.S. military outpost in Vietnam to find a bridge being protected by a confused array of soldiers who have no idea who they are fighting or who is even in command (when Willard asks one soldier who his C.O. is, the soldier replies frantically, “Ain't you?”). Coppola and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (1900, The Last Emperor) take full advantage of the film’s dye-transfer Technicolor process to steadily increase its surrealistic qualities, so that by this point Willard appears to be wandering through a battlefield reimagined as some kind of bizarre, carnivalesque extravaganza. War itself has lost any identifiable meaning or goal and has become a parody of itself.

After that, there is only Kurtz’s compound, nestled deep into the furthest depths of the jungle inside a crumbling temple. Marlon Brando was widely ridiculed for his lumbering, mumbling performance as Kurtz--anticlimactic was the only word people could think of, and to some it still is. Bathed in inky black shadows, his shaved head glistening as his seemingly disembodied voice floats out of the darkness, rambling and often incoherent, he almost doesn’t seem worth the journey.

Yet, at the same time, his very ambiguity gives the film its greatest jolt for it clarifies the ultimate meaninglessness of Willard’s journey. Kurtz could not have possibly lived up to Willard’s expectations or ours because he is ultimately just a human being, even though he is raised to god-like status in the eyes of his deranged followers. That these final scenes are rambling and murky, filled with endless exposition and gaudy visual effects is the best way the film could end. It is, in fact, the very antithesis of anticlimactic because Willard truly finds the heart of darkness and it is not that far removed from where he started.

Twenty-two years after Apocalypse Now debuted in unfinished form at the Cannes Film Festival, where it ended up sharing the Palm d’Or with Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum, Coppola created a new, longer version titled Apocalypse Now Redux. Some 49 minutes longer, including two extended sequences and a handful of shorter bits that had been left on the cutting room floor back in 1979, Redux is a fascinating experience, even if it is ultimately a weaker film.

My assessment of Redux as a weaker film than the original cut is directly related to my view of the film’s overarching narrative structure, which is that of a descent into madness. Of the two major sequences re-edited back into the film for Redux, one adds to this structured descent into madness while the other detracts from it.

The first sequence involves Willard and his crew coming across a military outpost that has fallen into disarray. This is the first instance where we come across soldiers who have no idea who is in command, which will be paralleled later at the bridge in the heat of battle. The Playboy bunnies are staying at this particular camp because their helicopter has run out of fuel, and Willard trades two drums of gasoline for two hours of time with the bunnies.

The sequence itself is not particularly good, as it drags on with two of Willard’s crew, the would-be saucier Chef (Frederic Forrest) and the professional surfer Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms), in awkward sexual scenarios with two of the Playmates. It is a grimy, somewhat disturbing sequence, but it at least functions to continue the descent into chaos. It also offers an explanation for why Mr. Clean (Laurence Fishburne) is so trigger-happy in the following scene in which he inadvertently sets off the massacre of a boat-full of innocent Vietnamese: It turns out he was a virgin and was denied any time with the Playmates, thus his sexual frustration has mounted to the point of hysteria.

The second reinserted sequence occurs after the bridge scene, but before the crew reaches Kurtz’s compound in Cambodia. In it, Willard and his crew come across a plantation near the border of Cambodia that is still run by French colonists, despite the war that is raging all around them. The sequence is largely expository, as the French colonists rage about France’s various military and colonial failures and how their ability to maintain control of this piece of land is a form of nationalistic pride.

This sequence, which is quite lengthy, offers an interesting moment in which European colonialism in Southeast Asia is foregrounded in a way that it is not in any other part of the film (although it is often implied). But, in doing so, it brings the narrative momentum to a dead halt. If we view the narrative drive as moving toward madness and chaos, the detour in the French plantation is a step backward, especially as Willard and his men enjoy a civilized meal and Willard has a tastefully photographed sexual encounter with one of the women there. If anything, this sequence plays as a brief respite in the film’s otherwise headlong trajectory toward Kurtz’s compound and the ensuing narrative and visual chaos--the calm before the storm, perhaps. But, in the end, it simply weighs the film down at a point when it should be charging ahead, having built up so much narrative momentum over the previous two hours.

But, even if the reinserted footage ultimately weakens the film as a whole, Apocalypse Now Redux is still a powerful--often devastating--cinematic experience. The hair-raising tales of the film’s production--from typhoons destroying the sets, to Martin Sheen suffering a heart attack in the middle of production, to outrageous cost overruns, to Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos taking back the military equipment he had loaned to the production in order to fight rebels--are legendary. Yet, it may have been the hell of production that allowed Coppola to construct such an incredible film, one in which the chaos of making it translated into the chaos of what is happening on screen.

Apocalypse Now was received with mixed reviews when it debuted in 1979. Three years and $30 million in the making, there were tremendous expectations riding on it, especially because Francis Ford Coppola was the most successful producer/director of the decade. It is perhaps only in retrospect that we can fully appreciate the monumental achievement of this film, despite (or, better yet, because of) its flaws. That Coppola felt the need to return to it and try to improve it in some way says less about the original 1979 version than it does about Coppola’s ultimate dissatisfaction with the project that nearly killed him. More than two decades later, it is a nightmare that he has still not been able to put completely to rest, but whether he recognizes it or not, Apocalypse Now remains one of the great achievements of the American cinema, and no amount of tampering can change that.

Copyright ©2006 James Kendrick

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