Apocalypse Now
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VHS Tape Cover Information
Actor: Bo Byers, Colleen Camp, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Sam BottomsPrimary Contributor: Marlon Brando
Primary Contributor: Martin Sheen
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog; French (Original Language); Vietnamese (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC
Running Time: 153 minutes
Release Date: 1992-12-07
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Publisher: Paramount
Studio: Paramount
VHS Movie Reviews of Apocalypse Now
Movie Review: Smells like Victory!
Summary: 5 Stars
Whether or not Apocalypse Now accurately characterizes Vietnam is beyond me, and I concede my ignorance out of respect and admiration for the men and women who sacrificed their real lives and real limbs in Vietnam --I judge only the cinematic merits of this great film.
The film opens in a small greasy hotel room in Saigon. Counterintelligence operative Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) has trouble readjusting to civilian life. His room is helter-skelter. He drowns himself with alcohol and drugs. Sometimes he'll lie on his back and gaze at the ceiling; the revolving blades of the ceiling-fan remind him of helicopter propellers. One day, two uniformed men show up at his room; they take him to Nha Trang. There, Com Sec Intelligence briefs Captain Willard. Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), Operations Officer 5th Special Forces, is wanted for murder. In 1964, Kurtz returned from Vietnam a changed man and wrote a report on what he saw in Vietnam; his report--addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Lyndon B. Johnson--was restricted. At 38 years of age, Kurtz made three requests to airborne training in Fort Benning, Georgia and was finally accepted. He joined Special Forces in 1966 and returned to Vietnam. Shortly after joining the Special Forces, Colonel Kurtz became unstable in his ideas and methods. He crossed into Cambodia where he lords over a tribe of natives who worship him like a god; Kurtz crossed into Cambodia to avoid arrest after he executed some Vietnamese Intelligence agents whom he believed were double agents. Captain Willard is to proceed up the Nung River in a Navy patrol boat, to pick up Kurtz's path at Nu Mung Ba, and to follow Kurtz's path. Upon finding Kurtz, Captain Willard is to infiltrate Kurtz's army and to terminate Kurtz with extreme prejudice.
Captain Willard has killed many men, but this is the first time that he is ordered to kill an American soldier.
He looks over Kurtz's dossier: top of his class, Korea, Airborne; almost 1,000 decorations; third generation graduate of West Point; Master's degree, Harvard University--there, Kurtz wrote a thesis on American foreign policy in Southeast Asia.
From Nha Trang, a helicopter transports Captain Willard to his patrol boat. Chef, a machinist and saucier from New Orleans; Lance, a gunners-mate and surfer from south Los Angeles; Clean, a gunners-mate and 17 year old African American male from the South Bronx; and Phillips, the chief and captain of the patrol boat--these men accompany Willard on his journey up the Nung River.
Willard and his crew rendezvous with Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall), a gung-ho war-tested officer. Kilgore's 9th Air Cavalry escorts Willard to Vinh Kinh Drap, a heavily fortified village controlled by Viet Cong peasants. Vinh Kinh Drap sits at the mouth of the Nung River
Six foot swells roll into Vinh Kinh Drap; likewise, the Air Cavalry thunders over Vinh Kinh Drap. Armies of screaming Bell UH-1D Huey's fan out of the rising sun. Bombs and bullets rain out of the sky; on the ground, 50-caliber machine-guns bristle out of trees and huts. The surging battle cry -- Ride of the Valkyries--gains momentum. The village of Vinh Kinh Drap washes into a splintered soup of trees, huts, and human corpses. A quartet of low-flying jets rushes by spraying napalm; underneath those jets, liquid flames devour a swath of trees and brush. Officer Kilgore admires the distant fires. He closes his eyes and swells his bare chest. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," he crows.
Kilgore and 9th Air Cavalry gives Willard's boat to the Nung River. The Nung River presents a bristling throat of trees, brush, and hidden dangers. As the patrol boat moves up the Nung River, Willard walks in Kurtz's shoes and sees what Kurtz saw.
A small sampan drifts towards Willard's boat. Willard and his crew detain the sampan. Food--mangos, fish, rice, etc.--and livestock--a couple of goats and some chickens--pack the hold of the ramshackle boat. Peasant farmers--several men and a young woman--occupy the small boat. Whether they are Viet Cong is less obvious to Willard and his cautious group. Phillips, the captain of the patrol boat, orders Chef to search the boat. Crates shatter and vegetables fly about; the peasants helplessly watch as Chef ransacks their boat. The animals on the boat become anxious. Chef and Phillips quarrel over the din of noisy animals. Everyone's nerves--the peasants, Willard and his men on the patrol boat--are taut. Clean and Lance machine-gun the boat. Rattling bullets jumble peasants, livestock, fruits, and vegetables into an oozing salad. Phillips and his men find nothing on the peasant's boat; however, this incident tells Willard more about Kurtz.
Nung River slowly pulls Willard's boat to Do Lung Bridge, the last army outpost. Strands of light-bulbs sag off of the broken bridge. The river vibrates around the patrol boat. Shooting flares tangle the night sky overhead. Gunshots and bombs reverberate. Bunkers dot the outpost. Soldiers spray wild bullets into the darkness; the darkness retaliates. Willard stumbles upon a bunker called Beverly Hills. He asks the soldiers for their commander; they don't have a commander. Willard and his men abandon the outpost and proceed down the Nung River. This incident tells Willard more about Kurtz.
The men on the patrol boat receive their mail. In a one-page letter, Com Sec Intelligence adds another wrinkle to Willard's mission. Several months ago, a man was ordered on a mission that was identical to Willard's mission. Com Sec Intelligence believes that Captain Richard Colby is operating with Colonel Kurtz. As Willard reads this letter, the other men on the boat are festive and rowdy. The surfer, Lance, celebrates by lighting a flare and waving its purple haze around the boat. On top of this error, it's also broad daylight. The 17-year-old boy named Clean is on the back of the boat quietly reading a letter his mother sent him from home. The purple haze billowing out of the boat informs the enemy. Gunshots attack the boat. Gunsmoke and purple haze clog the narrow river way. Phillips races the patrol boat up the river and out of danger. Out of the danger and out of the smoke, the boat is riddled with holes. Clean is sprawled at the back of the boat. He's dead. This incident tells Willard more about Kurtz.
As a film, Coppola's Apocalypse Now has the same flavor as Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. In both films, external forces cause men to evolve. In Apocalypse Now, the Vietnam war changes the heart of Kurtz; in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the sudden appearance of a planed monolith inspires primitive apes to evolve into modern man. Screenwriter John Milius adapted Apocalypse Now from Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. Apocalypse Now became notorious for its myriad production difficulties involving its soaring budget and its troubled cast. Coppola shot the film in the Philippines during the monsoon season; subsequently, a typhoon destroyed many of the film's sets. Coppola used the profits from his Godfather films to rebuild sets destroyed by the typhoon. Actor Martin Sheen, who played Captain Willard, was an alcoholic and suffered a near fatal heart attack during the film. Also, actor Marlon Brando, who played Colonel Kurtz, showed up on the set overweight. Coppola suffered from severe depression and with marital problems resulting from the stresses of filming the movie. He threatened to commit suicide on three separate occasions. Thankfully, he persevered and finished his movie. The `70's was a freakish decade for Copolla. In one decade, he made three films that are among the best films ever made. Has any director had a decade as successful as Copolla had in the `70's? Apocalypse Now is one of the great films of the last century. See it.
author of Gotta Be Down!
Summary of Apocalypse Now
In the tradition of such obsessively driven directors as Erich von Stroheim and Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola approached the production of Apocalypse Now as if it were his own epic mission into the heart of darkness. On location in the storm-ravaged Philippines, he quite literally went mad as the project threatened to devour him in a vortex of creative despair, but from this insanity came one of the greatest films ever made. It began as a John Milius screenplay, transposing Joseph Conrad's classic story "Heart of Darkness" into the horrors of the Vietnam War, following a battle-weary Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) on a secret upriver mission to find and execute the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has reverted to a state of murderous and mystical insanity. The journey is fraught with danger involving wartime action on epic and intimate scales. One measure of the film's awesome visceral impact is the number of sequences, images, and lines of dialogue that have literally burned themselves into our cinematic consciousness, from the Wagnerian strike of helicopter gunships on a Vietnamese village to the brutal murder of stowaways on a peasant sampan and the unflinching fearlessness of the surfing warrior Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who speaks lovingly of "the smell of napalm in the morning." Like Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God, this film is the product of genius cast into a pit of hell and emerging, phoenix-like, in triumph. Coppola's obsession (effectively detailed in the riveting documentary Hearts of Darkness, directed by Coppola's wife, Eleanor) informs every scene and every frame, and the result is a film for the ages. --Jeff ShannonDigitally remastered with 49 minutes of previously unseen footage, Apocalypse Now Redux is the reference standard of Francis Coppola's 1979 epic. A metaphorical hallucination of the Vietnam War, the film was reconstructed by Coppola and editor Walter Murch to enrich themes and clarify the ending. On that basis Redux is a qualified success, more coherent than the original while inviting the same accusations of directorial excess. The restored "French plantation" sequence adds ghostly resonance to the war's absurdity, and Willard's theft of Colonel Kurtz's beloved surfboard adds welcomed humor to the film's nightmarish upriver journey. An encounter with Playboy Playmates seems superfluous compared to the enhanced interplay between Willard and his ill-fated boat crew, but compensation arrives in the hellish Kurtz compound, where Willard's mission--and the performances of Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando--reach even greater heights of insanity, thus validating Redux as the rightful heir to Coppola's triumphantly rampant ambition. --Jeff Shannon
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