Apocalypse Now – 1979
This is another one of those movies that has a reputation as a great and profound work of art. It has a mystique about it that it is supposed to be deep and meaningful. Taking place during the Vietnam War, it delves into the psyche of its main character, Captain Benjamin Willard, played by Martin Sheen, as he is sent on a secret mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, because he has gone off the deep end.
Kurtz has become a renegade, setting himself up as a kind of demi-god in Cambodia, leading forces made up of Cambodian natives, Vietnamese soldiers, and brainwashed American soldiers. The U.S. government wants his command terminated “with extreme prejudice.” Captain Willard is ok killing the Vietnamese because they are the enemy. But murdering someone who is supposed to be on his own side turns the war into a completely different experience.
As I was watching the movie, I was struck by how much the film seemed to parallel the Joseph Conrad novel, Heart of Darkness. But as I did a little reading about the movie, I found that this was not a coincidence. Director Frances Coppola had specifically made a modernized film version of the famous book.
Willard is put on a boat with a crew of colorful characters. Albert Hall plays the Quartermaster, Chief. Frederic Forrest plays Chef, the Engineman. Laurence Fishburne and Sam Bottoms play Mr. Clean and Lance, both Gunner’s Mates 3rd Class. Clean is from the Bronx, and Lance is a professional surfer. It is their job to transport Willard up the Nung River, through dangerous “Charlie” territory, to Kurtz’s camp in Cambodia.
One of the things about the film that caught my attention was the insanity of it all. The 60s, the time when the Vietnam War took place, was a time when mind-expanding drugs of all different kinds were recreationally, and sometimes casually used. Somehow, Coppola really made a lot of the exciting action sequences seem like hallucinatory, drug-induced trips, and not just the scene where Lance actually drops a tab of acid. And the blurred visuals, the constant explosions, and the creepy, warped circus music, was like sensory overload.
There is a famous scene near the beginning of the movie in which Willard and the crew take part in a helicopter attack on a Viet-Cong village. The objective is to get them and their boat to the mouth of the Nung River. The man in charge of the attack is Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall. During the raid, about a dozen heavily armed choppers destroy the village, killing enemy soldiers and civilians alike, all the while blasting the epic music from Act III of Wagner’s opera Die Walkure, the Ride of the Valkyrie. It is after the raid is over, and a napalm airstrike is delivered that Kilgore utters that famous line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning… Smells like… victory!” Actually that is only part of his little monologue that is meant to show that he is not completely sane.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t say something about Marlon Brando. I’ll be honest, I don’t understand why everybody goes so gaga for his performance. He was alright, but nothing extraordinary. We have all heard the stories of Brando being so hard for Coppola to work with because he came unprepared, extremely overweight, not having read Heart of Darkness, not knowing his lines, making outrageous demands, and rewriting the script to his own liking.
But I actually read an article which claimed the opposite. It said that Brando actually came to the set very well-prepared, and that Coppola actually depended on him to help revise the script. But because Coppola felt overwhelmed by the film, he betrayed Brando and blamed him for what he saw as the film’s shortcomings. I don’t know if that is true. Brando’s part in the film was actually pretty small. He only showed up in the last 30 minutes of the 2 ½ hour film, and even then, I’d guess that he had about 7 or 8 minutes of screen time, getting paid $3.5 million.
Aside from that, Sheen’s performance was intense, and the rest of the boat crew did a very good job. There were also a few small roles with recognizable actors that surprised me. Harrison Ford played Colonel Lucas, a General’s aid, and Dennis Hopper played an American photojournalist who is a disciple of Kurtz.