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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 79.31%
Worth A Look: 7.59%
Average: 3.45%
Pretty Bad: 2.76%
Total Crap: 6.9%
4 reviews, 121 user ratings
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| Apocalypse Now |
by iF Magazine
"A hallucinatory and visually stunning classic."
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In 1979 there were two motion pictures in release that redefined the cinema experience as a headlong plunge into a nightmare from which there was no escape.These two movies took moviegoers to worlds they had never seen before, placing them in a visceral, emotionally wrenching environment that placed the same kind of psychological stresses on the viewer that the characters in these films went through during the course of their narratives. Movie-goers emerged from these films shell-shocked, with something akin to post-traumatic stress syndrome.
The two films were Ridley Scott's ALIEN and Francis Ford Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW. ALIEN was a science fiction horror film that placed viewers in a dank, claustrophobic environment in outer space. APOCALYPSE NOW took viewers to the jungles and rivers of Vietnam, a world in which Americans are stalked by a hidden, ruthless enemy and prone to the madness that their own hubris had gotten them into.
APOCALYPSE NOW was as hallucinatory and visually dazzling as any science fiction epic had been until the time of its release. Loosely adapted from Joseph Conrad's novel THE HEART OF DARKNESS, the film followed a military intelligence officer (Martin Sheen) on his journey upriver to seek out the encampment of an AWOL American commanding officer named Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). It's clear from the beginning that Sheen's character, Captain Willard, is coming apart at the seams. He's ready to leave civilization and his former life behind and now lives only for each mission the army gives him. On his way upriver, he's exposed to sights and experiences that unravel his tenuous connections to society even further: a titanic helicopter sortie into a Vietnamese village undertaken purely for the amusement of a surf-happy, megalomaniac infantry commander (Robert Duvall); an orgiastic USO show complete with Playboy bunnies; vicious, unexpected attacks from the jungle, and a futile, psychotic military standoff fought over a ruined bridge (in a nod to Sergio Leone's THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY).
By the time Willard reaches the compound of Colonel Kurtz late in this lengthy epic, both Sheen's character and that of the viewer have been worn down by the harrowing atmosphere of the film, the bravura sound mix by Walter Murch, Vittorio Storaro's incandescent cinematography and the stunning brutality and unexpected violence of the movie's jungle skirmishes.
The Kurtz compound scenes are a hothouse of still death, long maligned by critics as an unsatisfying denouement to an otherwise dazzling piece of epic film making. But Marlon Brando, as self-indulgent and wallowing as his sequences might be, is a living embodiment of the wicked decadence and moral confusion of Conrad's figure of Kurtz.
Paramount is not known for the depth of their DVD presentation, and APOCALYPSE NOW wins points for its painstaking transfer and audio fidelity to the original film experience while providing very little in the way of supplemental material for the viewer interested in exploring the background behind this fascinating cinematic riddle.
The lone extra of note is footage of the Kurtz compound being blown to bits at night in a long sequence of slow-motion and infra-red imagery. Most of this footage IS seen in the film, playing under the movie's lengthy end credits. The added presentation supplies all of the destruction footage and commentary by Francis Coppola which only hints at how fascinating a feature-length commentary by the director and other players in the production might be.A six-hour version of APOCALYPSE NOW exists, along with the superb documentary on the film, HEARTS OF DARKNESS, and one can only hope that all of this material some day finds its way to DVD. Whether APOCALYPSE NOW is a masterpiece or three hours of sheer folly, it will forever remain one of the legendary sign posts of modern day cinema.-- Jeff Bond
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=1361&reviewer=119
originally posted: 02/25/01 09:57:30
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USA
15-Aug-1979 (R)
DVD: 15-Aug-2006
UK
N/A (18)
Australia
02-Feb-1980 (R)
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