Apocalypse Now: Redux

Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 2001, 197 minutes

I didn't see Apocalypse Now on the big screen first time round, but fair enough, I was exactly nil years old, and I bet a lot of you reading this were even less. The Redux though, released in the UK just before Christmas, was indeed worth the 22 year wait, and when it's shown at Filmsoc, I'll go and see it again for its beauty intelligence and enjoyability.

Joseph Conrad's Victorian diatribe of European colonialism into Africa, is masterfully translated by Coppola into a modern diatribe of American colonialism into Vietnam. There's also a feline nod to Thomas Mann's equally chaotic post-Victorian novel "Death In Venice", and the immensely sweaty, smoky film is utterly beautiful. Especially when it's portraying the destructively horrible. Plus the soundtrack might finally declare the Dolby we installed into GST worth its wage.

All this could have been said about the original film, along with a confident remark that all the performances (Martin Sheen in the lead as Captain Willard, then Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Harrison Ford, little baby Laurence Fishbourne, big old greasy Marlon Brando and more) are excellent, but the new scenes really do make the film better. Not in a Star Wars Special Edition "prettier" way, but a simply higher content. More humour, plot, romance and depth are added, the latter three bringing the film text closer to Conrad's novel in a way that will bring many of the initial releases severest critics (there weren't many of those, and they were all hung up on "Translation", I gather) into it's favour. The strongest effect of the new scenes though, and the aspect which their detractors have noted, is to complicate Willard's character, a set of motivations and actions that do well to be more confusing and complicated than originally presented. This is not a simple war, story, man, mission or film.

Whether you're familiar with the 1979 release or the 1899 novel or neither, the film is a totally enveloping physical and interior journey of awareness you should see as one who appreciates film. Francis Ford Coppola is a master of technique, and the hours never drag for me.

Or, the opportunity does of course exist to let it all fly over you and say "Oh Blood and Madness, isn't gore pretty, I want to be a soldier when I'm big", wowing at the helicopters and the big fiery bangs from the outset.

Still read Conrad's Heart of Darkness though it's only 150 pages long, so you could do it in the same time!

Review by Indianna Jed
Written for EUFS Programme Spring 2002