Apocalypse Now

Apocalypse Now

The 1970s was Coppola's decade. He was involved in a succession of masterly films, as screenwriter on Patton, producer of American Graffiti, director of the first two Godfather films and The Conversation, and finally, in 1979, as true auteur of Apocalypse Now. They illuminated our times, and we can now see that Apocalypse Now is not merely the greatest film to come out of the Vietnam experience but one of the great works about the madness of our times. He immediately followed the early morning preview screening of Apocalypse Now at Cannes with a press conference which he began by saying: "My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam," and he went on to state that during the shooting "little by little we went insane". How brave and prophetic he was.
Coppola took Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's enigmatic story about the cruelties of colonialism, and turned it into a 20th-century fable about neocolonialism in which the story's eminently sane narrator, Marlow, becomes Captain Willard, the Special Services hitman, as crazy as his assigned quarry, Colonel Kurtz. The difference is that unlike everyone else around him, from the top brass down, Willard knows he's mad. Everything about the Taliban, al-Qaida, the pressures that took us into Afghanistan and Iraq, the assault on Abbottabad and the deadly troubles that lie ahead are to be found here in Willard's journey. It's a work of genius that may falter a little towards the end, though not fatally. This newly released version is more or less the one shown at Cannes and is definitive. The half-hour of material introduced 10 years ago inApocalypse Now Redux is of no value, it diminishes the film and is to be avoided.