Heart of darkness

IS IT the greatest movie ever made?
Whenever the lists of the greatest films of all time are compiled, there alongside “Citizen Kane” and “Gone with the Wind” will be the dark vision that is Apocalypse Now.
From the gripping opening sequence, with a genuinely drunk Martin Sheen as Captain Willard lurching naked around a Saigon hotel room, to the shattering climax, this film is pure celluloid perfection.
The plot has burnt-out, expendable US Army officer Willard assigned to travel upriver on a patrol boat to assassinate rogue army officer Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando).
High command says Kurtz has gone up the river with a Montagnard army that worship him like a god and obey every order, however ridiculous. The order is to terminate – with extreme prejudice.
“The river snaked through the war like a mains circuit cable, plugged straight into Kurtz,” Sheen’s rasping voiceover narrates.
The journey involves Willard examining his own heart of darkness, and his own self-loathing. It leads to the eventual confrontation with Kurtz, in which Willard must decide if Kurtz is truly mad, or the sanest man he has ever met.
Along the way, this road movie on a river sees Willard confronted by enemies both on the land, and in the form of the boat crew themselves.
Apocalypse Now took method acting to new heights. Enfant terrible director Francis Ford Coppola famously said that the film crew in the Philippines was exactly like the Americans in Vietnam. They had too much money, too much technology, too many people, too much equipment … they went into the jungle and, slowly but surely, they went insane.
This 1979 film is a triumph of the movie-maker’s art. Every dollar they spent – and they spent plenty – is up on the screen for all to see.
The script is jaw-dropping in its intensity, and the battle sequences have a hyper-real quality to them.
The horror and insanity of war is writ large here, as never before.
The acting is top notch. Robert Duvall, particularly is unforgettable as blood and guts Air Cavalry Colonel Kilgore, who loves “the smell of napalm in the morning.”
Drug use was rife by the craft and crew during filming, and much dialogue was improvised.
The hardship that was the ordeal of making this masterpiece is the stuff of legend. The sets were destroyed by a typhoon, Martin Sheen had a heart attack during filming (at age 36, no less), and the pivotal helicopters were removed from the shoot so President Marcos could fight communists.
Oh, and the script was eternally being re-written during shooting … and Marlon Brando showed up weighing more than a baby elephant.
As shooting dragged on and on, the film was dubbed “Apocalypse When” and then “Apocalypse Never”.
For Ford Coppola, the challenge to again triumph after “The Godfather” was huge. At the peak of the crisis, the director announced: “This film is a $20 million disaster. I’m thinking of shooting myself.”
Much of what we know of the inside story of Apocalypse Now comes from the excellent documentary “Hearts of Darkness” shot by wife Eleanor Coppola during filming. The less that is said about Ford Coppola’s later revisitation of his own work, in “Apocalypse Now Redux” the better.
This butchering of a classic destroyed the icy coolness of Willard’s relationship with the rest of the crew on the boat, lengthened the film, and turned the issues it addressed into cartoons.
We can forgive Ford Coppola this, as we can forgive him anything. He gave us Apocalypse Now.
– Jason Beck