Personal Canon ~ #100
Apocalypse Now
"the horror... the horror"

[editor's note: The following article was originally posted in November 3rd 2005. It is republished here with some alterations.]

Apocalypse Now (1979)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Screenplay by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola based on the novel "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad
Starring: Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms, Dennis Hopper, Laurence Fishburne and Harrison Ford
Production Company Zoetrope Studios Distributor United Artists Released 08/15/72

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Most serious war films that have arrived in the last quarter-century, and probably any to come in the next twenty-five years, find themselves inevitably judged in relation to Francis Coppola's classic Apocalypse Now. Certainly any movies that plunge into the psychic anguish of war risk the comparison. Some, like Jarhead, acknowledge this debt upfront. (Though that technique hardly rescues them from harsh correlative appraisals)

Despite the fact that most new films are deemed unworthy to breathe the canonized air of Apocalypse Now, I doubt that the film would receive the same shower of affection were it released fresh into the world today. It's tough to imagine a movie like this opening now and being widely hailed as a great film and also big hit. I see people scratching their heads. I see limited box office and scattered critical hosannas in the realm of a Dogville or a Mulholland Drive. Resolutely idiosyncratic and feverishly hallucinogenic auteur pieces are not well loved today. They're usually polarizing. Along with the raves come critical dismissals: "what were they thinking?" "unsatisfying" "confusing" "pretentious" "messy." This breed of filmmaking no longer courts hit status and multiple Oscar nominations as this Vietnam film did. Audiences --and even critics-- don't like to grapple with challenging material in the way that they used to, or at least not as much as they used to.

And let's face it, Apocalypse Now is often downright confounding. For example: What exactly is the director doing revealing himself onscreen in the famous beach sequence? There he is in the midst of all the chaos shouting at his lead actor (Martin Sheen) to not look at the camera. It's a moment that would be unthinkable to see in an acclaimed film now. Yet, it's the moment in watching Apocalypse Now that I realized that I loved the film, the moment I became unhinged realizing that anything could happen in this film. The chaos of its hallucinatory brilliance became complete. This film was in my head as well as on the screen. Coppola's vision (And Coppola himself !) had left the realm of the fever dream for a waking nightmare. By the time you reach the end of the river hours later you've completely absorbed the film's surrealities and you're as ready as the poor souls onscreen to be taken in by the insanity embodied in Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando).

But conjecture and description of audience response aside, Apocalypse Now opened in the 1979 at the tail-end of that time period when both filmmakers and audiences embraced great and dark auteurial visions with regularity. Films with rough weird edges were welcome to the party back then. Francis Coppola was on one of cinema's all-time hot streaks as he began this Vietnam film, having just made The Godfather, The Godfather II, and The Conversation back to back. Imagine that. With Apocalypse Now he forged another brutal classic --four in a row. What the making of this film did to him, as detailed in the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmakers Apocalypse, doesn't have as happy an ending. But great art, they say, has its price.

"the horror... the horror"

-Nathaniel R

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