My film is not about Vietnam…it is Vietnam.

-Francis Ford Coppola

   

  

    In 1979, the war in Vietnam was long over. After the fall of Saigon in March 1975, America had lost 58,000 troops in what would be the country’s most disastrous military defeat. And then came the films. By 1979, many anti-war films had come out against Vietnam including the documentary Hearts and Minds, the romance Coming Home, and the drama The Deer Hunter (which won Best Picture at the Oscars early that year) had already established filmmakers hatred for what many considered an unnecessary and wrong war. But none of those films would even come close to what the imagination of The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola would create. His work on the Vietnam War would be less of a statement against it and more of a journey into madness, using the war as its start. Apocalypse Now dares us into understanding the fear of our own souls and what drives us into darkness.

No other movie functions close to the level on which Apocalypse Now aspires. The film, which went through a hellish production, remains a pinnacle in telling a story that isn’t so much of a story than it is a mood. It is a Vietnam War film; it takes place during the height of the war and follows a soldier on a mission. But like the quote preceded this essay with, it is less about the history and the problems of the war than it is about recreating the madness, confusion, and disparity of the war. There is so much crammed in Coppola’s vision of Vietnam that its almost impossible to know where to begin. Each sequence has its own curiosities to it and each step brings us more into Coppola’s belief about what drives a man over the edge. Vietnam may be the start, but by the end it is truly about what can turn us away from humanity. And on that reason alone, this is truly the greatest film ever made, in my opinion. I have seen over a thousand films in my lifetime, and not a single one comes even close to what Coppola has accomplished with this opus magnum.

The origins of Apocalypse Now star with a novel that actually had nothing to do with Vietnam. Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness in 1898, and little of what remains in Coppola’s film derives from his novella. Conrad’s story does feature a character named Kurtz who has become a god figure among a group of natives. There is a character that travels up river to meet Kurtz, but not to assassinate him. But the spirit of the novel is kept alive. Both the protagonist (Marlow in the book, Willard in the film) sees the atrocities that could drive a man like Kurtz into darkness. But while Conrad’s novella was an attack on European Colonialism, Coppola used Vietnam to make a statement on American interventionalism, though at no point is this actually stated. Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness are truly completely separate works of art, but they share the same spirit.

Coppola’s style and themes can be derived also from other films of the time: mainly Werner Herzog’s 1972 journey of madness entitled Aguirre: The Wrath of God. In Herzog’s strange film, a group of conquistadors search for the city of El Dorado in South America, eventually being destroyed by nature, falling into madness. In a way, it could be seen that Aguirre (played brilliantly by Klaus Kinski) could be Kurtz before he fell into madness himself. Strangely enough, the filming of Aguirre was a hell bent experience for many, just as Apocalypse Now would become (more on that later). But from its opening notes, Apocalypse Now is a film that one might think begins in madness, but it’s only the beginning.

    After an introduction of napalm burning to the famous Doors song “The End,” we meet our protagonist, Captain Willard, played by Martin Sheen. Willard, trapped in a hotel room, uses narration to communicate with us. He’s trapped he tells us and in limbo. He can’t decide if he wants to be home or back in the jungle. As he shatters a mirror, he destroys his own identity, which he has lost.

    The mission he is given though becomes the heart of the film. In a strange and chilling scene, a general, colonel (a small part by Harrison Ford), and a third silent civilian, tell him the story of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. It is Willard’s mission to travel up river to find Kurtz, who has created himself as a god among a tribe of native Cambodians, and terminate him. “Terminate with extreme prejudice,” says the silent third man, meaning he must probably be a CIA officer. What makes this scene so curious is how calm and collected these men act. They eat a dinner consisting of roast beef, shrimp, and Budweiser while they discuss the atrocities that Kurtz has accounted for. In this, Coppola makes a larger attack on the leadership during Vietnam. Not only did they truly not know how to fight the war, but also their passive measures toward the war may have been the reason we lost it.

    Naturally, Willard accepts the mission because it is one shrouded in mystery. As we learn throughout the film by Willard’s narration of reading Kurtz’s file, the colonel was probably the greatest officer in the army. So what happened? Why did Kurtz become such a threat? It’s this danger, this mystery that drives us forward. But before we even reach Kurtz, we know why he went insane. Coppola’s depiction of what Vietnam was like makes us in a way understand Kurtz when we get to him. But not just yet.

Willard ends up on a “plastic patrol boat” with a group of four other soldiers, who no absolutely nothing of his mission. They include Chef (Frederic Forrest), a New Orleans chef turned machinist, Lance (Sam Bottoms), a world class surfer turned gunner, Mr. Clean (a very young Laurence Fishburne, years before The Matrix), a young youth with rock in his mind and a gun in his hand, and Chief Phillips (Albert Phillips), the boat’s commander. By the end of the journey, each one of these men will come to their own terms about the madness that the war brings.

    In the first strange turn for the crew, they must get help into the river by a crew led by Captain Kilgore, played by the strange Robert Duvall. When we first meet Kilgore, he is a macho and heart strong man who makes bold and irrational decisions. But right in the middle of combat, he drops everything to meet Lance, since he is a surfing fan. Kilgore’s irrationality may make him and illogical captain for the war, but when we actually see him fighting the war, we understand why men like him were put in charge.

    The Ride of Valkyries scene probably is my favorite scene in the entire history of film. It works on so many levels: being a macho battle scene and an anti-war message at once. As Kilgore rides his men in one helicopters, he plays Wagner’s classic song, which Kilgore says “Scares the hell out of the slopes. My boys love it.” As the helicopters approach the village, the Vietnamese at first seem like innocent people (we see a group of school children). But as Kilgore’s men fire the first missile toward the town, it is almost impossible not to feel like pumping a fist in the air. The attack is so intense and manly that this could truly be considered testosterone on screen. But the originally innocent Vietnamese end up being not as tough as we thought. In one part of the scene, a helicopter lands to pick up a wounded solider. Suddenly, a young girl runs towards the aircraft and throws her hat into it. The helicopter explodes. Soon other artillery appear out of nowhere as Kilgore’s men have to quickly react to the dangers. Eventually though, we get the napalm attack by a group of jets, and as Kilgore tries to get Lance to surf the beach (as the fighting continues), he reminisces about napalm. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning…Smells like - victory. Some day, this war's gonna end.” Kilgore’s last line is usually omitted in discussion, but it’s his quintessential moment. He acts if without the war, he is nothing. This is the only reality Kilgore understands.

    At this point, the journey up the Nung River begins. After being attacked by a tiger and learning the lesson to “never get out of the boat,” the crew arrives at a Playboy USO show. In this scene, we see “American values” transported to a foreign country. Scantly clad girls dancing in tantalizing ways that would be unknown to the Vietnamese. But just as the fighting corrupts the men, the desire for women leads to a charge on the stage. At this point, Willard reminisces on how the lack of this type of show led the Vietnamese on a better fight.

    The insanity truly starts to begin at this point. The crew starts to argue amongst each other while Lance decides to camouflage his face. “So they can't see ya, they're everywhere,” he remarks. The crew reaches their breaking point though when Chief decides they must search an innocent Vietnamese boat, despite Willard’s command. The crew remains edgy on their guns while Chef searches until a young girl makes a break to save a bag and the crew opens fire. It turns out, that the entire boat died because the girl was trying to save an innocent puppy. With the girl wounded but not dead, Phillips argues they must take her to a medic boat. Willard ends this idea with a shot in the heart for the girl. The crew moves on.

The Dung Lo bridge sequences that follows, is probably the strangest and best example of what turns the crew into madness. The visuals of the bridge and the strange music that Coppola accompanies Willard search around the bridge show the powerlessness that one soldier truly had. “You're in the asshole of the world, Captain” another man remarks. What the bridge represents in my mind in the bridge between reality and darkness. After passing the bridge, which was the last strong American held point, the crew is truly on a passage to madness.

    From this point, Coppola simply builds the anticipation toward Kurtz. How can such a man live up to the expectations we’ve seen? After seeing the other atrocities, why does the military truly want this man dead? As we approach Kurtz’s compound, we see his followers, a tribe of natives who frighten with every look. And then we meet a man only known as the photojournalist, played by Dennis Hopper. Hopper’s role is crucial is making us understand Kurtz. Kurtz is so shrouded in mystery and darkness that Hopper’s character is what tries to justify Kurtz’s action. He sees Kurtz as a god (“we are all his children”) and a leader that is the only one who can understand Kurtz’s world.

    And after all of this, we finally meet Kurtz. Unlike in the novel, Kurtz, as played by Brando, is an obese (almost 300 pounds) and delusional man, completely bald and always hidden beneath darkness. Brando doesn’t meet our expectation; he defies them completely. Kurtz isn’t a god. He is a delusion man shrouded in his own mind, unable to comprehend reality. This is what the war has done to a man like this. It has changed him. It has made him no longer a man. He reads T S Elliot’s The Hollow Men because it represents how he has come. Coppola in no way prepares us for what Kurtz will be like, because he surpasses how far a man can go into darkness than we previously thought.

    But the end has to be the completion of Willard’s mission. And it’s Kurtz who wants this most. He must kill Kurtz. It’s his god given duty, thus the juxtaposition of the killing of the caribou. And all Kurtz can remark is “the horror…the horror.” For Kurtz, the end of the horrors of life is now over as he collapses. He is no longer face with having to live and see the atrocities of life. The others, as Willard leaves the compound, sees him as a god, for he has killed god. But Willard is finished. He simply gets on the boat and leaves. Just as he passively enters the story, acting only as an observer, Willard passively leaves.

    Though many find the ending to Apocalypse Now unsatisfactory, I find this is the only way Coppola could have ended it. There is no cure to madness. There is no way to understand what happened in Vietnam. Just as Willard leaves the compound, the US left Vietnam shrouded in an unknown and dangerous future.

    Just as stunning as the film is the production of the film. Shot on location in the Philippines, the film went over budget, over schedule, and those involved fell into the same madness as Kurtz. Coppola became suicidal during the shoot, and Sheen had a heart attack on set. Brando showed up over weight, not reading the script or Heart of Darkness, disillusioned in madness. A typhoon almost destroyed the film completely. A seventeen-week shoot became thirty-four weeks. The film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse tells the story of the madness that shrouded the making of this film, as shot by Coppola’s wife Eleanor.

    When Coppola originally finished making it, he had a six-hour film on hand. IT obviously had to be cut and edited extraneously, and even Coppola hadn’t finished editing it completely when it reached the Cannes film festival in May 1979. Though the accepted version ended up at two and a half hours, Coppola was apparently never satisfied with this version. In 2001, he released Apocalypse Now Redux, which added 49 new minutes of footage, including a second sequence with the Playboy bunnies and a scene at a French plantation. This version neither adds nor subtracts to Coppola’s original vision, simply extending it. It is rumored that a 289 minute version of the film exists somewhere on bootleg.

    Apocalypse Now also made a technical achievement: the introduction of 5.1 surround sound, which is standard in Hollywood films today. Along with his father Carmine’s score, and classic counterculture rock songs of the 70s from The Doors, The Rolling Stones, and Jemi Hendrix, the sounds and music that accompany Coppola’s piece only further drive the film into madness.

    Apocalypse Now is truly the only film I have ever seen that is worthy of the title masterpiece. This film can be viewed on so many levels, be discussed by so many different viewpoints, and enjoyed in vastly different ways that this film will never be forgotten. Francis Ford Coppola has never made a single movie even close to his other work of the 70s (The Godfathers and The Conversation) and I believe it is because he put in soul into madness creating this film. Apocalypse Now is an examination of the darkness of the human psyche through the atrocity of the Vietnam War. It is truly an observation of the horrors of life. It is impossible to not feel nihilistic or even slightly destroyed by this film. Every time I watch this, I lose part of myself to it. Apocalypse Now truly has the power to take my soul. And for that reason, this is the greatest film ever put on a cinema screen.