BFI Top 50: Apocalypse Now, Released in 1979, Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

What I know going in

I have seen Apocalypse Now once before. I found it quite astonishing if I bit messy. I look forward revisiting it (on a Blu-Ray with a big T.V.).

Immediate Reaction

I am worried this piece will turn into an enthusiastic, rambling recounting of various moments from the film, but I will do my best to keep my thoughts organized.

If you take nothing else away from Apocalypse Now it will be this, America 100% did not belong in Vietnam and its presence had a hugely negative impact not only on the country itself, but also the men forced to serve there. Coppola conjures up some of the most astounding images ever put to celluloid to scream this at the viewer for over two and a half hours. As many virtues the film has, subtlety is not one of them. You could glean this theme from the very first shot: A peaceful, verdant forest being engulfed in an explosive, orange fireball.

After Willard’s initial freak-out, which immediately establishes a tone of insanity and leaves the viewer disoriented and confused, the film transitions into a blackly comic mode. This comedy, and the intentional contrast between them and the native Vietnamese, is used to make the majority of the Americans look incongruous, incompetent, or buffoonish (and often all three simultaneously). This strain begins with Willard’s briefing. Every element here establishes the higher-ups as blissfully unaware of how out of place they are. From the mobile home they have vainly attempted to transform into a crude imitation of a suburban dwelling, to the way the three officers subdue their language in order to hide the cruelty of Kurtz’s actions. For a quick example, see the conversation surrounding one of the film’s most famous lines:

 

Colonel Lucas: Your mission is to proceed up the Nung River in a Navy patrol boat. Pick up Colonel Kurtz's path at Nu MungBha, follow it, learn what you can along the way. When you find the Colonel, infiltrate his team by whatever means available and terminate the Colonel's command.

Willard: Terminate... the Colonel?

General Corman: He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. And he is still in the field commanding troops.

Jerry: Terminate with extreme prejudice.

Colonel Lucas: You understand, Captain, that this mission does not exist, nor will it ever exist.

The way the officers speak here is just so deliciously and banally evil. Instead of directly stating Willard’s mission with words like “assassinate” or “murder” they use “terminate”. Instead of confronting the atrocities Kurtz has committed, they couch his rampage in phrases such as “operating without any decent restraint” and “totally beyond the pale.”

This through line continues once Willard boards the small navy patrol boat that he will be riding for the rest of film. Several scenes show the boat disrupting the calm rivulets of Vietnam, and violently rocking the aquatic fauna and tiny docks littering the river edges. The movie one-ups this disruption by showing the crew surfing, blasting music, and drenching several peasants in the process.

All of this comes to a head during the scenes incorporating the introduction of Kilgore and the subsequent beach raid scene. Seeing it again, it is hard me describe the effect of these sequences. Mulling it over, the closest I have come is describing it as if Jacques Tati stumbled onto the set and was told to direct one of his famous Rube Goldberg-esque, background-detail heavy comedic set pieces, but with soldiers and tanks instead of oblivious French people and impersonal architecture. Kilgore himself even resembles Tati’sHulot in his constant, faux-authoritative posturing in spite of the crazy shit happening around him. Furthermore, like Hulot with his pipe and rustic clothing or Chaplin in his tramp outfit, Kilgore has a defining piece of clothing, his incongruous cowboy hat. There is just so much going on in the background of these scenes. Thousands of dollars were probably spent on effects that are only onscreen for a second. A tank burns down a building, bomb are constantly exploding, crying Vietnamese children are rushed into an amphibious vehicle to an unknown destination, American soldiers issue meaningless messages to the natives, religious services are held, and a church is being built. This swirl of opposing visual and aural cues reads as more darkly humorous and prevents viewers from enjoying the spectacle of the whole thing on a base level. Of course, there is the famous use of “Ride of the Valkyries” as the soldiers ascend in a group of helicopters. For a brief moment, this sequence threatens to become “cool”, but Coppola immediately undercuts that satisfaction by showing just how underequipped the opposition is compared to the Americans.

And why were all these helicopters mobilized, missiles launched, bullets fired, napalm deployed, forests destroyed, and people killed? Because a jackass commander wanted to see a dude surf.

If the first half of Apocalypse Now is the most expensive black comedy ever made, its second is a waking nightmare, depicted with frightening clarity. After the USO stage show, the boat crew comes upon the last army outpost in the region. They are greeted with a hallucinatory freak show that seems perfectly matched to Lance’s acid drop. The first sight is a group of soldiers fleeing the coast and pleading for a spot on Willard’s escort. The crew reaches the shore, are handed a mail bag (don’t ask how it got there), and are welcomed to “the asshole of the world.” Willard and Lance go ashore to look for the CO. Afterwards; they enter this world of fusing, abstract colors and competing waves of circus music and guitar freak-outs. Everyone they encounter is either on the edge of madness, babbling to themselves, or completely silent from witnessing some unspeakable trauma. There are even a few moments where Willard’s face is completely enveloped in darkness. It is the masterpiece showcase for Coppola’s control of lighting, sound, and mood. Again, it is hard for me to describe how this sequence’s effect on me. Awed, wide-eyed horror is probably the best I can come up with. If, on the off chance, you found those earlier sequences humorous or, heaven forbid, “awesome”, this sequence obliterates any bearings you might have previously had and replaces it with disorientation, confusion, and terror.

Side note: A few of the shots here seem to explicitly reference a Russian film called Letter Never Sent. Although it was fairly difficult to catch Soviet films in America at that time, the film was released in 1959, almost 30 years before Apocalypse Now. It is unlikely Coppola saw the film before making this one, I would not say it is impossible considering he is from the film school brat generation, and some of the similarities are quite striking.

Finally, Willard and his crew, well what’s left of them anyway, make it to Kurtz’s hideout. The sequence opens with an eerie shot of a canoe line slowly parting. It is hard to believe what we are witnessing is actually taking place during modern times. It honestly feels like the boat entered a time warp and stumbled upon an ancient civilization of blood thirsty Mayans. The characters, in their stunned silence, seem to share this disbelief. Again, I am at a loss at how to describe the mood here. I do not even have the words to explain the lighting during the nighttime. I guess it technically has a yellow hue; doom gold might be more accurate. It is like the sun exploded, and its last, faded rays are somehow reaching the darkest corner of the Earth. Kurtz is kept in shadow, and a clean shot of his face or body is never presented. He does not even look human anymore, more like a bloated version of Count Orlok from Nosferatu. Eventually, Willard is framed to look like a savage, inhuman warrior, with the warpaint to match. In a strange, ritualistic ceremony, Kurtz commands Willard to slaughter him. Kurtz is killed and Willard has completed his descent into madness, and thus, the film ends…

Random Notes

·        I am surprised how well the film gels together after watching it for the second. It does not follow any type of traditional structure. The whole thing feels more like a nightmarish travelogue with Willard has our cracked guide than a typical movie. However, all of the disparate elements of the film (Willard’s nihilistic, pulp musings, the black comedy of the first half, and the horror of the second half) all flow together nicely. The movie pushes the viewer along slowly, much like the river our protagonists are traveling backwards in time on.

·        I have also been thinking a lot about how the film treats the native Vietnamese. We rarely get a close-up of any of the combatants (at least compared to the American soldiers). The film keeps a literal and figurative distance from them and they become more a vague, impersonalized force, than actual people. I am not sure if that is best way to handle things, but it makes sense from the character’s point of view.

·        The acting here is also incredible. Everyone does a fantastic job, even with the tiniest part. There are even a few roles that I think are really outstanding, but have been drowned out due to the praise for Duvall, Sheen, and Brando. Sam Bottoms as Lance is a particular highlight. He convincingly transforms from a sun-baked, surfer kid to a kind of zen-warrior with very little dialogue, and almost totally in the background. His arc is one of the creepier aspects of the film. Albert Hall as Phillips futilely tries to make his boat a bastion of order and sanity. His last, perfectly delivered line (“A Spear…”) deserves to be more iconic than it is. The last member of the crew, Frederic Forrest as Chef, goes a little bit over the top, but his constant agitation regarding his surrounding works as an audience surrogate.

·        Of course, Sheen and Brando deserve all the praise in the world. Sheen somehow makes a very inactive character work perfectly. Without his stern face and haunted eyes, the film would not nearly work as well as it does. As for Brando and his character…, I am not entirely sure what to think about Kurtz. He is so far gone that words like “insane” and “evil” seem too mundane for him. On my second watch, I developed a strange kind of admiration for how far he goes in his role as a soldier. I watched Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, about the Japanese author who lived and died by his word, recently. Mishima saw his life and eventual suicide as a singular expression of his work. While I do not agree with his actions, there is a certain, twisted logic to his life. Kurtz, in his total abandonment of every aspect of civilization in pursuit of a specific goal (to win the war), reminds me of the late author. 

·        Finally, the Blu-Ray of the film is goddamn amazing. You can see every bead of sweat on the actors’ faces, and every insane detail happening in the background. Even the reflections of Willard’s surrounding are visible in Sheen’s eyes.

 Phew, I think this longest review I have written so far in the series. I probably did not keep my promise from the beginning. Oh well…

 Further thoughts

As part of my extracurricular research on the film I listened to Coppola’s commentary about the film and watched his wife’s, Eleanor, documentary about the making of the film, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Almost every discussion of Apocalypse Now eventually turns toward a recounting of its making. This is not surprising, as Coppola himself has remarked that the making of the film perfectly mirrored America’s intervention in Vietnam. I have to admit that before I watched the making of, a lot of this talk came off as a bit mean. Like the reviewer was above the film and was incredulous about the fact that Apocalypse Now was at all coherent. Well I agree with one aspect of these discussions, the making of the film was truly insane, and I doubt that any director will ever face the same amount of physical and mental challenges that Coppola dealt with, at least not with the large amounts of money he somehow wrangled from investors (ah the 70’s!). As documented in Hearts of Darkness, the government of the Philippines frequently wrested its military away from Coppola at a moment’s notice to fight rebels who may, or may not, have been feet away from the crew, Harvey Keitel had to be replaced by Martin Sheen weeks into shooting, a typhoon destroyed nearly all of the sets, Sheen had a heart attack and barely clawed his way back to health, and almost all of the actors (Sam Bottoms, Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, and Dennis Hopper especially) were at various times drunk, high, spaced out, and strung out. Finally, Coppola himself nearly lost it, gave up, or was near the edge of crazy for much of the shoot. He had to extensively rework John Milius’s script to have a more ambiguous and confronting ending, one which he did not decide on until nearly the end of shooting. He had to somehow roll with all the setbacks that were thrown his way and come out not only with a movie that was an artistically coherent, but one which would make $40 million, otherwise he would personally go bankrupt. Indeed, Coppola’s descent reflects the arc that Willard goes through and the arc we ascertain that Kurtz has already gone far past.

 The fact that Apocaylpse Now works, and works so well, shows that Coppola did not just pull this film out of his ass. It is clear to me that in the post-production stages, Coppola carefully constructed the film to flow neatly from black comedy to outright madness and from the American follies of the Vietnam War to the savagery of a more ancient time. Coppola deserved all the awards in the world, and he did win the Palme d’Or (arguably the highest award a film can win), for his achievement.

 Why is the film on this list?

I will let the main man speak for himself: "My movie is not about Vietnam... my movie is Vietnam."