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Still flawed, Coppola's re-edited film is also still a masterpiece
by Joe Tarr
I first saw Apocalypse Now about 15 years ago, but there's a couple of scenes that still resonate, mainly because at the time it was one of the most disturbing things I'd ever seen on film.
One is where the crew of a boat heading up river to Cambodia board a Vietnamese boat. The soldiers bark commands at the passengers. One of the soldiers is ordered against his will to search the boat, as his edgy comrades aim their guns at the Vietnamese. When the soldier goes to peek in one barrel, a young Vietnamese woman cries and runs toward him. The crew opens fire, mowing everybody down. When the smoke clears, they discover the woman was only hiding a puppy.
It's the kind of scene you can imagine played out in wars throughout the last century—scared, nervous soldiers forced to fight what they've been told is evil end up finding themselves capable of an equal or greater wickedness. I don't for a minute pretend to know what it's like to fight in a war, but Apocalypse Now gave me a feeling of what it might be like. I didn't like the feeling.
Apocalypse Now was filled with great scenes like these, but it also had its share of flaws. It was a bit of a mess, Marlon Brando showed up way too fat (although not nearly as bloated as I remembered him to be), and director Francis Ford Coppola could never decide how to end it. Although the problems in a way enhanced its greatness and mood, Coppola recut and remastered the film, added 44 minutes of previously unseen footage, and called it Apocalypse Now Redux.
It's still a flawed movie, but it remains a masterpiece, and it's great to see it on a large screen.
Based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the film is set during the heart of the Vietnam War. Most people probably know the plot: Martin Sheen plays Captain Willard, sent on a secret mission into Cambodia to kill Col. Kurtz (Brando), a once-brilliant Army man who has lost his mind and is waging the war on his own terms. Willard is escorted up river by a small patrol boat of four men who have no idea what he's doing or where they're headed.
First and foremost, Apocalypse is a collection of great scenes and moments. There are so many of them—Willard's nervous breakdown at the film's start; Robert Duvall's Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore prancing the beach and dreamily proclaiming, "I love the smell of Napalm in the morning"; Laurence Fishburne getting killed while a tape from his mother plays on his recorder. The movie is beautifully shot and has incredible sound.
As a whole, Apocalypse Now works on two levels. One is a realistic depiction of the brutality and chaos of war. It also plays off the themes of Conrad's novella, looking metaphorically at the darkness inside men's souls, the reasons that they're driven to war and murder.
Most of the added footage comes in two lost scenes, both of which operate as metaphor.
In one, the men come across a desolate camp far up river and discover the Playboy bunnies they watched dance a few nights before, stranded without fuel. Willard trades a couple of barrels of fuel for a few hours with the bunnies. As one of the soldiers slowly undresses and molests the Playmate of the Year, she tells him about how being a playmate involves doing lots of things you don't want to do, and how she can't explain this to anyone. As she's raped, she gives voice to the predicament of the soldiers themselves—forced to do brutal things they later cannot explain to family and friends, they feel isolated from the world and society.
The second added scene takes place when the boat, traveling beyond the American front, come across an old French family plantation. The crew is invited in for dinner, with wine and cognac. Willard is reminded of the context of the war, and the civilization he left behind. The plantation's existence in the heart of Vietnam at the height of the conflict is absurd. But it's no more absurd than the idea that the French and the Americans could hold on to their pretensions of "civility" while waging a barbaric war of dubious justification.
It's hard to say whether these new scenes add anything to the film, or which version will be the one that future generations watch. Apocalypse still has plenty of flaws. Parts of the movie do feel dated. It's hard not to chuckle at Marlon Brando's "the horror" line. But the fact that it has been parodied so much testifies to how the film has resonated through pop culture in the past 20 years.
The movie remains mostly a collection of great scenes, performances and images, as it grapples with issues it cannot ever hope to resolve. The fact that it tries to grapple with them at all, and does so in such grand, evocative ways, has ensured it a place in the canon of great films.
October 11, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 41
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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