Apocalypse Now Redux (1979/2001)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Apocalypse Now Redux (1979/2001) – F. F. Coppola

I never got around to watching this Redux version – and it has probably been more than a couple of decades since I saw the original.  So, I’m coming at it reasonably fresh – and what I discovered is a druggy-sort of epic, not so much masterpiece as mess, but full of amazing and memorable sequences.  Martin Sheen is Captain Willard, a special ops officer who is assigned to assassinate renegade Colonel Kurtz (Brando) who has possibly gone insane but who is definitely not working from the U. S. Military’s playbook.  The plot comes (loosely) from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (including the final line, “the horror!”) although the screenplay is from John Millius and the voiceover narration (Sheen’s) is by Vietnam vet Michael Herr).  The redux version adds a visit to a rubber plantation run by French expatriates and a total of 49 extra minutes for all of the other scenes as well.  In fact, Vittorio Storaro reprinted the negative (this time in amazing Technicolor) and Walter Murch re-edited the film from scratch. The often echoey sound, psychedelic music and repeated use of superimposed images in a hallucinatory montage really create a disturbing head trip for the midnight movie crowd ready to dispense with “reality” (and, of course, the reality depicted here – the Vietnam War – was pretty damn disturbed to begin with).  Although the discussion of colonialism now included in the plantation sequence injects more explicit political content then was in the original, it is safe to say that director Francis Ford Coppola and his team were less concerned with the impact of the war on the Vietnamese and Cambodians and more interested in showing just how f---ed up it was for the Americans sent over there (and for the cast and crew of this film, as shown in 1991’s documentary Hearts of Darkness).  It’s a real trip, full of horror and insanity, but bloated (especially Brando) and unfocused – nevertheless, it’s also a landmark film.