Apoc­a­lypse Now (1979)

If the first casu­al­ty of war is truth, Apoc­a­lypse Now must be the great­est lie ever told. Because here, in the jour­ney of a Marine cap­tain through the dark heart of Viet­nam, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la has cap­tured the full spec­trum of war – its hor­ror, mad­ness and grotesque, cos­mic absur­di­ty. But in doing so, he embarked on a par­al­lel jour­ney – a ruinous, cathar­tic expe­di­tion both phys­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al. Pushed to the lim­its of his own ambi­tion, he refash­ioned his film into some­thing clos­er to poet­ry than fic­tion, and con­ferred on Apoc­a­lypse Now its own awful, irre­sistible truth.

That truth is less about the events of the war itself (though they are recre­at­ed with stun­ning authen­tic­i­ty) than the mad­ness at the heart of human nature. If Apoc­a­lypse Now appears to pre-empt many of the Viet­nam movies that fol­lowed – dis­till­ing into a sin­gle film the action spec­ta­cle of Pla­toon, the psy­cho­log­i­cal dra­ma of The Deer Hunter and the moral ambiva­lence of Full Met­al Jack­et – it is because at the time, Cop­po­la imag­ined it would be the only Amer­i­can film to deal with the war. It fell to him, or so he thought, to make sense of Vietnam.

For inspi­ra­tion, he reached beyond the war to some­thing more fun­da­men­tal, find­ing it in ​‘Heart of Dark­ness’, Joseph Conrad’s account of coloni­sa­tion in the Bel­gian Con­go, first pub­lished in 1899. Here, in the char­ac­ter of Kurtz the ivory trad­er, Con­rad cre­at­ed a sym­bol of the west’s destruc­tive greed and cru­el­ty. To Cop­po­la, who reimag­ines him as a rene­gade Colonel, he is even more complex.

Brando’s Kurtz shows us what lies beyond the lim­its of human behav­iour. Evil, cer­tain­ly, but also a kind of ter­ri­ble clar­i­ty. In the face of mad­ness, the only sane response is insan­i­ty. Kurtz, in his vicious­ness and sav­agery, has achieved enlight­en­ment. He has set him­self free.

Shot in the Philip­pines between 1976 and ​’77, with post-pro­duc­tion stretch­ing into 1978, Apoc­a­lypse Now, still unfin­ished, received its world pre­mière at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val in 1979, where it shared the Palme d’Or with Volk­er Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum. For Cop­po­la, it was the cul­mi­na­tion of a jour­ney steeped in mad­ness and mythol­o­gy, as ardu­ous and trans­for­ma­tive in its own way as the events he set out to cap­ture on camera.

His expe­ri­ence in the Philip­pines wrote itself into Hol­ly­wood leg­end. How the bud­get, orig­i­nal­ly set at $14 mil­lion, dou­bled after a calami­tous shoot, with Cop­po­la per­son­al­ly liable for the over­age. How Paci­no, McQueen and James Caan all passed on the role of Willard. How Har­vey Kei­t­el was hired then fired. How Bran­do was paid $3 mil­lion and turned up over­weight and unpre­pared. How the Philip­pine gov­ern­ment lent Cop­po­la heli­copters and pilots, only to demand them back to attack rebel forces. How a typhoon destroyed the set. How Cop­po­la strug­gled with the end­ing. How he lost him­self in the jun­gle. How he nev­er real­ly came back.

But what’s strik­ing about watch­ing the film through new eyes on the big screen – restored and re-mas­tered by Zoetrope Stu­dios – is how none of that real­ly mat­ters once the lights go down and ​‘The End’ strikes up over a back­drop of thud­ding chop­pers and psy­che­del­ic smoke. It’s not nos­tal­gia that dri­ves Apoc­a­lypse Now, it’s the dawn­ing thrill that this is a movie that mat­ters in the here and now of new con­flicts and old lies. ​“Some day, this war’s gonna end,” says Robert Duvall’s Cap­tain Kill­go­re. But it didn’t end, it just moved on. Kurtz sur­vives – maybe not in a jun­gle, but some­where, in a mil­i­tary geared to fight for­ev­er wars against abstrac­tions and ideas. Apoc­a­lypse now, yes­ter­day and tomor­row, for sure.

Mar­tin Sheen plays Cap­tain Willard, a US Marine assas­sin recruit­ed to find and kill Colonel Wal­ter Kurtz, for­mer star offi­cer, now AWOL, com­mand­ing a pri­vate mili­tia some­where in Cam­bo­dia. The local tribes wor­ship him as a god. On his orders, they have exe­cut­ed three South Viet­namese army offi­cers sus­pect­ed of being dou­ble agents.

Kurtz, Willard is told by the top brass over shell­fish and chilled wine, has passed beyond the bounds of accept­able human con­duct. He is told about pow­er, moral­i­ty and ideals. Ratio­nal­i­ty and irra­tional­i­ty. Mil­i­tary neces­si­ty. It is the politician’s litany of hypocrisy. The truth is both sim­pler and more com­plex: ​“He kept win­ning it his way,” observes Willard as he begins to under­stand both the mis­sion and his target.

The film’s nar­ra­tive thread is pro­vid­ed by the Meekong Riv­er, the artery run­ning through the cen­tre of the war. For extend­ed sec­tions, Apoc­a­lypse Now assumes the trap­pings of a road movie, as Willard and the crew of his Navy patrol boat bear wit­ness to the car­ni­val tragedy of Viet­nam. The fur­ther they progress, the more episod­ic and dis­joint­ed the film becomes. The effect is to fore­ground the mys­ti­cal nature of Willard’s jour­ney, and repo­si­tion the Meekong from nar­ra­tive thread to a brit­tle moor­ing of con­scious­ness, moral­i­ty and civil­i­sa­tion, all of which are inex­orably loos­ened as they approach Kurtz’s compound.

Dis­cur­sive as it may be, Apoc­a­lypse Now con­tains unfor­get­table moments of dra­ma. Most famous is the Air Cav­al­ry assault on a Viet­namese vil­lage to a sound­track of Wagner’s ​‘Ride of the Valkyries’. But what’s strik­ing about this scene and, lat­er, the Do Long Bridge (‘ass­hole of the world’), isn’t the sound and fury, the chaos, or even jaw-drop­ping expense. It’s the con­trol, the pre­ci­sion, the sub­tle lay­er­ing of images.

Coppola’s mas­tery of the frame is absolute. When Willard lands in the wreck­age of the vil­lage that Kill­go­re and his men have recent­ly anni­hi­lat­ed, the cam­era stays on his face, curi­ous­ly impas­sive as the scale of the car­nage is revealed at the edges of the screen. Dead vil­lagers, drift­ing smoke, rogue explo­sions, a con­fu­sion of noise, cul­mi­nat­ing in the star­tling image of a cow being air­lift­ed to safe­ty – all these ele­ments accrete, one by one, until you lose your­self in the over­whelm­ing whole.

There’s a ten­sion here between ​‘cin­e­maness’ and ​‘real­ness’. In Killgore’s chop­per assault, the strains of music and the mul­ti-cam­era orches­tra­tion are pure cin­e­mat­ic spec­ta­cle. But what real­ly gets the blood pump­ing in your ears isn’t Wag­n­er, it’s the sound of the engine whine as the chop­pers scream over the bay. What moves you is the authenticity.

In these moments, Apoc­a­lypse Now shows its age – but glo­ri­ous­ly, hark­ing back to an era when you could believe your eyes. When films pos­sessed that unmis­tak­able aura of real­ness and dan­ger. CGI may have opened up new pos­si­bil­i­ties, but it has robbed future gen­er­a­tions of expe­ri­ences like this one. And yet, even as it pro­gress­es, Apoc­a­lypse Now unteth­ers itself from the real to explore the mys­tic, poet­ic nature of Willard’s con­fronta­tion with Kurtz – and himself.

Cop­po­la strug­gled with the end­ing for months – he had come to embody both of his pro­tag­o­nists, con­sumed by their trans­for­ma­tions and break­down. In its final moments, the film reach­es a kind of apogee, as if the last thread of rea­son and intel­lect hold­ing it togeth­er has snapped, and all that is left is pure, pri­mal pow­er. For Cop­po­la, it rep­re­sent­ed an artis­tic break­through, but in a more pro­found sense, Apoc­a­lypse Now marked the end of an era. There was noth­ing left after this. His rela­tion­ship with the film indus­try would nev­er be the same. For­get the awards, the hyper­bole, the reviews. He had, like Kurtz, passed beyond judgment.

More than any­thing, the re-release of Apoc­a­lypse Now puts these last three decades into per­spec­tive. This is the film that took every­thing Cop­po­la had to give – finan­cial­ly, phys­i­cal­ly, spir­i­tu­al­ly and emo­tion­al­ly. It cost him his mar­riage, his inde­pen­dence and almost his mind. But unlike the war whose truths he so painful­ly illu­mi­nat­ed, his suf­fer­ing served a noble pur­pose. Cop­po­la made a friend of hor­ror in the jun­gle, and it repaid him with some­thing astonishing.