Category: War drama/book-to-movie adaptation
Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
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In keeping with the military theme around ANZAC Day, given my last review was for The Water Diviner, I'll now review another military-themed movie, but this time a little more dark and serious...
I watched Apocalypse Now for the first time back when I was in high school and was tasked to write a report about it. There wasn't much compunction about letting the older kids/young adults studying a quite mature film since it was final year, and it was either this, or To Kill A Mockingbird. And goddammit, I wanted some action! Little did I know all those years ago that I was actually writing a book report by-proxy, the book in question being Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad about a man who travels up a river on behalf of an ivory trading company in Belgian-controlled Congo and witnesses large-scale depravity. Change a few details, modernise it to be a reflection on a highly unpopular war and voila, an old story is new again.
I appreciated this movie as being fairly decent when I first saw it all those years ago and noticed it has made numerous "must watch before you die" lists, so I wanted to re-watch this with mature eyes - to see if it stood the test of time.
From the initial 1979 release, two subsequent versions were created - Redux and Director's Cut. However here, I'll only be reviewing the standard theatrical cut. Redux adds scenes to the standard cut, and then Francis Ford Coppola went and added yet more scenes to create the Director's Cut which removed some scenes from Redux. Can't wait for the Mega-Ultra-Redux-Director's Cut-5-Hour-Marathon edition…
The plot:
The movie follows Capt. Ben Willard (Martin Sheen) who we see alone on a bed in a Saigon hotel room dealing with the mental demons from his previous Vietnam deployments and his inability to adjust to life back home. He is suddenly visited by military escorts and summoned to appear before higher-ups who have a mission for him. The mission (should he choose to accept it) is to "terminate, with extreme prejudice" the command of Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a brilliant soldier who has decided to separate from the US forces and now has his own private militia in Cambodia that worship him as a god.
