Apocalypse Still
APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX
For better or worse, Coppola revised epic doesn't change much.
With Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper
Written by John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Herr
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
WHO COULD FORGET - or who even remembers - the dark cloud of hoopla that rained on the national release in 1979 of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s famous anti-Vietnam-War movie? It cost too much, it took too long, Martin Sheen had a heart attack, Marlon Brando was too fat, Coppola didn’t know what he was doing or why he was doing it.
Most of this was true, and none of it ultimately matters: Art can be messy, and cinema art can be an especially costly mess. Nor should it matter that to this day, Coppola reminds people that his movie made money, something you’d think shouldn’t matter to an artist just relieved to get it out of his system.
Now Coppola’s extended version of his epic runs for 200 minutes, and with the exception of a sequence set at a French plantation, I’d swear we’ve already seen every single frame of this reconstructed film. And yet, Apocalypse Now Redux contains 50 minutes of footage previously seen by nobody but Coppola, his colleagues, and a few early festival preview audiences.
Trust me: I’m not psychic. (or as Derek Zoolander might say, bulimic). It’s just that Redux doesn’t tell us anything more about Capt. Willard or Maj. Kurtz or Vietnam or Coppola than Apocalypse Now did 20 years ago. The movies stand as a testament to Coppola’s visual orchestration and to his ideological passion, which you might arguably called unfocused, but which we can probably agree doesn’t come with an intellect quite as deep as its heart.
In case you walked in on the middle of this, Apocalypse Now tells the story of Willard (Sheen), an Army captain so numbed by the war that he’d just as soon kill himself. So he begs for another mission, and he gets it: Travel up river into Cambodia (officially forbidden territory) and find Kurtz (Brando), a West Point graduate and once-brilliant officer who’s gone mad and taken the war into his own hands.
Willard makes the perilous trip upriver on a transport boat with four good Navy boys: Chef (Frederic Forrest), a New Orleans saucier; the baby-faced Clean (Laurence Fishburne, age 14); Chief (Albert Hall), a Manhattan taxi driver; and Lance (Sam Bottoms), a surfer dude who likes to see the skies light up with artillery fire. On a beachhead strewn with bodies, he meets the crazed Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who "loves the smell of napalm in the morning," and who orders his men to surf on breaking six-foot waves before the shooting stops.
Many people die - some of them Vietnamese woman and children - before Willard finds Kurtz at his enclave, where he’s become a deity worshipped by the indigenous people and by a wacked-out American photojournalist (Dennis Hopper, who acts like he’s on drugs or something). There, Willard and Kurtz talk about their existential dilemmas before each meets his destiny.
By the time Redux ends, you’ll surely agree with the bloody Kurtz: "The horror," he mutters, his face in grotesque closeup, "the horror." (This insight applies even to the wars we win.) As for the messages winnowing through the rest of Redux - Kurtz’s calm invective about the lies (or naiveté) of President Johnson and his generals, the aimless battles of a senseless war, Willard’s sullen suicide mission into the heart of darkness - it all came across just as well (or not) the first time.
Willard’s bleak voiceover narration - written afterwards, by Michael Herr - still sounds as woefully silly in 2001 as it did in 1979. The excess and frenzy of the battle scenes still shock and horrify. The opening sequence carries with it the power of its breathtaking images and the fame it’s earned over the years: a jungle, a conflagration, some helicopters, and the Lizard King singing about the end of the world.
And while the sequence at the plantation adds some depth to the landscape - the French landowners explain the Domino Principle to Willard (it’s news to him) and assert that they, as benevolent colonialists, have a right to this land - it seems as much like a didactic scolding as a useful bit of storytelling.
The dialogue in Apocalypse Now has plenty of weighty one-liners about the madness of Vietnam. Some of them gave pause back then and also do now, some still don’t work, and some have lost their impact in the course of history. Perhaps nothing says it better than the Frenchman who tells Willard, "You Americans are fighting for the biggest nothing in history."
But despite Coppola’s mad genius, you’re left with the feeling that Apocalypse Now in any form is not so much a movie as a hackneyed metaphor, with symbols so leaden that they collapse into their own gravity, and with stunning moments of clarity and humanity that bring you back into it. Remember, too, that because Coppola made this all before the age of digital effects, his frenetic battle scenes are palpable with the danger they must have posed to the artists.
So here it is again: the biggest cinema event of 1979 from an embattled filmmaker trying to say something big. If history has taught Coppola one thing, it’s that he works better when he focuses on character and story. This reduxed Apocalypse won’t make much difference to his legend in the long run. In the meantime, it’s a mildly fascinating flashback to a time when movies mattered more than they do now, and when a blockbuster was more than a multiplex summer hit with two pretty-boy studs playing good guys.