 Apocalypse Now DVD cover. Apocalypse Now is a film by Francis Ford Coppola, inspired by Joseph Conrad's classic novella Heart of Darkness and Homer's Odyssey. Set in the Vietnam War, a taciturn American soldier is sent to "terminate with extreme prejudice" a rogue colonel in the Green Berets. What ensues is a series of often bizarre events; contemplations on life and war.
The film features performances by Martin Sheen as Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Marlow in the novel), Marlon Brando as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, Dennis Hopper as a fast talking hallucinogenic photojournalist and Robert Duvall in an Oscar-nominated turn as the borderline-psychotic Colonel Kilgore. Several other actors who were (or later became) prominent stars had minor or supporting roles in the movie including Harrison Ford and Laurence Fishburne.
Background
Filmed in the Philippines, the film went far over budget and schedule: a typhoon destroyed many of the sets, the Philippine Army helicopters used for shooting were constantly called back by Ferdinand Marcos to be used in actual combat, the lead role was recast (Martin Sheen replaced Harvey Keitel after shooting had begun), Sheen then had a near-fatal heart attack, Brando was intractable and out of shape, and Coppola himself was mentally fragile. After the first edit, the film was six hours long and had to be severely edited; the original released version was just over two and a half hours long. (Coppola re-released the film in 2001 under the title Apocalypse Now Redux, restoring footage and sequences and lifting the running time to 200 minutes.) For background information on the film, see Eleanor Coppola's documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, released in 1991.
Synopsis
Captain Benjamin L. Willard, an officer of the American special forces, has come back to Saigon having understood that, after years of war, he is no longer fit for ordinary life. A group of intelligence officers approach him with a "special mission". He has to go up the river, passing the frontier with Cambodia, and find Colonel Walter E. Kurtz.
They state that this Kurtz, a member of the Green Berets, once considered a model officer and future general, has exiled himself from the Army and is commanding a legion of his own troops somewhere in Cambodia. Willard is asked to undertake a mission to find Kurtz and dispose of him 'with extreme prejudice'. With reluctance, Willard accepts the mission.
Having left Saigon, Willard reads Intelligence's secret papers and acknowledges that Kurtz, in his personal compound deep in the Cambodian jungle, has become disillusioned, and has declared himself a warlord to be worshipped by the natives. Another officer, sent to kill Kurtz, has fallen victim to his charm and has become one of his adepts.
Willard begins his trip up the Mekong on a PBR ("patrol boat, rigid") , with an eclectic crew composed of Chief Phillips, a black Navy boat commander; Lance B. Johnson, a tanned all-American surfer; Tyrone, AKA "Clean" a black teen; and Jay "Chef" Hicks. Willard begins a deep journey not only into the jungle, but into himself, considering the many implications of his mission. He reads through Kurtz's dossier, attempting to understand the man that is causing the US such trouble.
The PBR arrives at an LZ where Willard and the crew meet up with Colonel Bill Kilgore, a merciless commander of the AirCav in the region. Kilgore, a keen surfer, befriends Johnson and declares that up river there is a beach with perfect surf. The problem is, his troops say, it's "Charlie's Beach". Dismissing these gripes, Kilgore orders his men to saddle up in the morning so that the AirCav can take the beach. Riding high above the coast in a fleet of Hueys, Kilgore launches an attack on the beach. The scene, famous for its use of Richard Wagner's epic "Ride of the Valkyries", ends with the soldiers surfing the barely claimed beach amidst skirmishes with infantry and VC.
Willard and crew continue up river having had their PBR dropped by one of Kilgore's Hueys at the mouth of the river. The lighting and mood change as Willard descends into loneliness and despair, adjusting to life aboard the isolated PBR. He rarely speaks to the crew, tending instead to Kurtz's dossier and further alienating himself from the world around. The crew encounter, among many things, a run-in with a tiger, an impromptu inspection of a Vietnamese boat (leading to an accidental slaughter of the occupants by Tyrone), a surreal stop at the last American outpost in Vietnam, before arriving at Kurtz's palatial compound.
Willard leaves Chef on the boat, descending with Johnson to meet with Kurtz. Willard orders Chef to attack the village if he and Johnson do not return. Kurtz seizes the opportunity and takes Willard prisoner. In a series of dazed half-dreams, Willard has Kurtz reveal to him his nihilistic philosophy and his desperation. Willard understand why Kurtz has spared him, he knows that he has been sent to kill him, but he is left to his own devices because Kurtz wants to die. Willard kills Kurtz, and then, coming back from the hut where he had been kept, looks upon the natives as they ready themselves to accept him as their new master.
Alternate Endings
Coppola denied having any actual alternative endings. In the DVD commentary, he states that they simply had a massive amount of footage to edit with and thus had some choices to make. They did consider using the explosion footage made during their destruction of the Kurtz compound, but he later decided that implying that the air strike had been called in was contrary to his wish to offer some slight hope that we could overcome the horrors of war.
The book and the movie
Although inspired by Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness the film deviates from it extensively. Time and location are changed: from the Congo Free State (colony of King Leopold II of Belgium) at the end of the 19th century to Vietnam at the time of the Vietnam war. Subsequently Willard (Marlow, in the book) and Kurtz are not commercial agents seeking for fortune but soldiers of the American Army. Captain Willard is not sent to bring Kurtz back, as in Heart of Darkness, where he dies of natural death, but to kill him.
In spite of this, Coppola has maintained many episodes (the attack on the boat, for example) and respected the spirit of the novel and in particular its critique of the concept of civilization and progress. The fact that European colonization is substituted with American imperialism doesn't change the universal message of the book. [1] (http://www.cyberpat.com/essays/coppola.html)
Awards
Apocalypse Now won the 1979 Palme d'Or (Golden Palm, the highest prize) at the Cannes Film Festival. It is the only film to have won this prize before the film was actually completed.
It also won two Academy Awards in 1979:
Other nominations were:
In 2000 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Cast
Characteristic lines
Willard
- "The shit piled up so fast you needed wings to get over it."
- "Mr. Clean came out of some South Bronx shithole, and I think the light and space of 'Nam put a zap on his head."
- "Charlie didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep, or movin' too fast. His idea of R-'n'-R was cold rice and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home: death or victory."
- (In dialogue with two minor characters:)
- Willard: "Who's in charge here, soldier?"
- Infantryman: "Ain't you?"
- [Dialogue and action intervene.]
- Willard: "Soldier, do you know who's in command here?"
- The Roach: "Yeah." [Turns away from Willard, and the scene ends.]
Col. Kilgore
- "I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like .... victory!" [Wistfully:] "Ya know, someday this war's gonna end."
- "Charlie don't surf!"
- "[As audio psychological warfare in the minutes before an airborne attack opens,] we use Wagner. My boys love it. It scares the hell outa' the slopes."
Kurtz
- "You're neither [an assassin nor a soldier]. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill."
- "The horror. The horror."
- "It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies."
- "If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill - without feeling, without passion, without judgment - without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us."
Minor characters
- "Never get out of the boat!"
- "Dis sho' is a bizarre sight in the middle o' this shit."
- (Upon receiving an obviously mortal wound, in the midst of a mock attack of blunt-headed arrows:) "A spear!"
External links
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Apocalypse Now
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