“I love the smell of napalm in the morning!”
Cast: Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando and Robert Duvall
Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now is based on the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Set during the Vietnam War, Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) is dispatched on an illegal CIA mission. He must travel up the river into the Cambodian jungle and assassinate US marine renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) who has set himself up among the native tribes as a God.
This film is simply fantastic, though I wouldn’t really categorise it as simply a war epic. It tends to focus a lot upon Sheen’s character and his personal development throughout too.
This doesn’t mean that the depiction of the war is by any means weakened though. The director, Francis Ford Coppola, really aimed to create a haunting and bleak vision of the War and did so with great success. While some may complain that as the film closes it loses its plausibility and becomes rather unhinged, Coppola really answered this complaint best with: “This film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam”. It just shows the true madness and lunacy that the cold war drove people to and Coppola’s attempt at conveying this as well as possible.
Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando and Robert Duvall are all simply stunning in their roles. Each giving memorable and electric performances that had me glued to the screen. From Sheen’s convicting performance of a deeply troubled soldier to Duvall’s character seemingly delightful and enthusiastic about the war and then to Brando’s self-created “horror”, each one really made their mark within the film.
Some years after Apocalypse Now was released, a film documentary – Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse – really told of all the struggles that notoriously pushed back the release of the film several times. Sheen suffered a heart attack, Brando showed up to the set overweight, extreme weather saw the destruction of several sets and Coppola couldn’t settle on how he wanted the film to end, so at times the producers were unsure if it would ever make it on screen. But it did, and it was well worth the wait.
Star rating: 9/10
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
Running time 153 minutes.
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