WhatzUp

Apocalypse Now Redux
by Derek Neff

In the space of one month Francis Ford Coppola has re-entered the spotlight as sort of the curator of his earlier, best work. Earlier this month, The Godfather Trilogy, remastered and with scene-by-scene commentary by Mr. Coppola, came out on DVD. Last week saw the re-release of his 1979 Vietnam war movie Apocalypse Now, with nearly an hour of additional footage, remastered sound and picture, all repackaged under the name Apocalypse Now Redux.

Redux is a mixed bag, but well worth delving into if you’re a fan of the original. At over three meandering hours, it will tax the attention spans of even the most patient of moviegoers, but much of the added footage is quite good, and, let’s face it, the original Apocalypse Now wasn’t exactly a short walk in the park.

Based on Joseph Conrad’s short novel Heart of Darkness (though the movie feels more like an assemblage of linked short stories than a unified longer work), Apocalypse tells the story of Willard (Martin Sheen, who, famously, nearly didn’t survive the 238 days it took to shoot the movie), an army captain whose mission is to travel upriver into Cambodia to assassinate former Green Beret Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has gone mad and whose methods, to use the terminology of the military, are “unsound.” Willard commandeers a small patrol boat, piloted by a stern captain (Albert Hall) and staffed with a very young machine gunner (Lawrence Fishburne, barely out of puberty), a Louisianan nicknamed Chef (Frederic Forrest), and an acid-dropping former surfer (Sam Bottoms). Along the way, Willard embarks on a mind-bending odyssey in which he encounters a grandiose cavalry commander (Robert Duvall, uttering the immortal line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”), a Playboy Playmate show gone awry, an old-fashioned plantation peopled by French colonials, and some confused soldiers guarding a blown-out bridge, among many others.

Coppola, who has recently made enjoyable but inconsequential movies like Jack and The Rainmaker, was once the epitome of the self-indulgent genius director. At the time of its original theatrical release, Apocalypse was a scandalously expensive movie; the documentary of the making of the movie, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which I highly recommend, shows how close Coppola came to falling apart in the jungle before it could get finished. In many ways, Apocalypse Now was the swan song for the prototypical 70s movie; in a decade full of daring, edgy, groundbreaking mainstream American cinema, Apocalypse was one of the greatest, and one of the last. By the time it came out, Star Wars had already begun to change the landscape of the Hollywood movie, and nothing has been the same ever since.

The added footage is no more self-indulgent than the footage in the original cut and blends in no more awkwardly into the context of the movie than many of the original scenes. (As great as Apocalypse Now is, its narrative pacing and general cohesiveness are and always have been somewhat lacking, in my opinion.) The French plantation scene goes on a bit too long, but now that I’ve seen it I can’t imagine the movie without it. There’s a follow-up scene with the Playboy Playmates — the boys arrange a deal to spend some intimate moments with them during a monsoon — and it seems to me at once very funny and very sad. In another newly included scene, Willard steals a surfboard belonging to the Major (Duvall), then hides in the shadows as the Major sends out helicopters to track him down. The scene doesn’t really work for me, because Willard doesn’t seem capable of that kind of mischief.

Indeed, Willard has always been the movie’s Achille’s heel: he’s not just an anti-hero; he’s an anti-character. We not only don’t sympathize with him, we never know him. (Even Sheen’s voice-over narration doesn’t help the situation; I’ve never liked Sheen’s voice-overs in Apocalypse, which are too conventionally hard-boiled.) Willard is an observer only, a cipher with a coldly murderous acumen. He is, as far as movie heroes go, actually quite boring. But he is surrounded by such colorful figures, and such beautiful scenery, and such terrifying violence, that we are riveted despite the yawning black hole that is his personality.

I should add that the movie, on widescreen DVD, looks incredible, and the remastered sound is a wonder to behold. In this spruced-up version, Apocalypse Now could have been made yesterday; it’s only the occasionally dated-sounding film-score (heavy on the synthesizers) that gives the film away as a product of the 1970s. Having said that, I’m not sure that Redux should become the definitive version of the film. Compared to the already bloated original version, it nearly topples under its own excessive weight.

I would love to see Coppola make another important movie. At his peak, he was among the best this country has ever produced. It is exactly his brashness and arrogance that make Apocalypse the great, unforgettable (albeit flawed) movie it is.