Apocalypse Now Redux (1979 / 2001)

An extended version of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 classic, with nearly an hour of 'new' footage filling out the story of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) and his patrol boat crew as they voyage upriver, encountering perils and aventures, towards the compound of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a US officer accused of insane war crimes but who just might be the first American to understand the Vietnam War.

It's only natural to want favourite films to be longer, and now they can be.

All the world knows, thanks to Hearts of Darkness and several books, of the epic struggles Francis Ford Coppola went through getting his Vietnam-set epic reimagining of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness completed. Its eventual commercial, critical and cult success came only after a lot of people had accused Coppola of being as jungle-mad as his Colonel Kurtz. He now claims he felt pressure to make Apocalypse Now into a straight-ahead action / war movie, but always had in mind something more surreal, more political and more weird. Now he's gone back to the raw material, not simply cutting in deleted scenes like a mere DVD special edition but reassembling the whole film from scratch on an even more epic scale.

The first thing: Apocalypse Now is as good as ever. Generations who can quote most of the dialogue (from 'Saigon, shit' through 'never get out of the boat' to 'even the jungle wanted him dead') but have only seen it on video will learn just how astonishing the film can be on the biggest possible screen with the best possible sound system. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and sound designer Walter Murch, deployed by mad general Coppola, create effects that work only in a theatre and which will stay with you forever, from the haunted tropical hotel room where Martin Sheen is found having a breakdown through Colonel Kilgore's Wagner-scored helicopter attack on the surf-friendly riverhead occupied by the VC to the atrocity-filled encampment where Dennis Hopper scuttles as acolyte to an ambiguous monster whose name comes half from (Walter Elias) Disney and half from Conrad's Mr Kurtz.

But what about the new stuff? It's all good, but there are niggles – when Willard and his men rag Kilgore (Robert Duvall) by stealing his surfboard, it deepens their characters and makes some nice relief, but the extra footage blunts Duvall's great exit line ('some day this war's gonna end'). The Playboy bunny scene, set in a rainswept abandoned hospital, has moments but feels unfinished and a crucial moment with Laurence Fishburne is still MIA. The long French plantation sequence has weird echoes of Sid James and company taking tea during battle in Carry On Up the Khyber, but the first ghostly appearance of the colonials in the mist is a magical moment. A bit with Brando reading articles aloud makes this a more specific film about this particular war, but is literal editorialising. Now, it's a slower film, with a little more intellect and sentiment, but perhaps the added time to think will make you feel less overwhelmed.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Empire (issue inknown)

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