Apocalypse Now (1979)

At a 1979 Cannes film festival press conference, seen in the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, Francis Ford Coppola said of the still-unfinished Apocalypse Now:

'My film is not about Vietnam, it IS Vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy ... and the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.'

Apocalypse Now seemed twenty years ago to be a simply overwhelming picture. It took a long time to get made. The idea of shooting a version of Joseph Conrad's slim novel Heart of Darkness set during the Vietnam War first came up in 1969, when writer John Milius wrote the first draft screenplay for then-underground filmmaker George Lucas to direct. Milius, in the documentary, enthuses that he would have liked to make the film in Vietnam and that the crew would have arrived just in time for Tet (the Vietnamese Christmas, and the date of a devastating Vietcong offensive that reversed the course of the war). Lucas, who later reused much of the plot of the film in the Star Wars trilogy - the hero who has to face and kill his father figure to avoid becoming him - was less keen on exposing himself to real bullets than the gung-ho Milius, and retreated into a special effects fantasyworld from which he has never emerged; though, if you look closely, you can see that Harrison Ford's character in Apocalypse is named 'Colonel G. Lucas'.

Milius was partially attracted to the project because Orson Welles hadn't been able to lick Heart of Darkness as a screenplay in 1941 (Nicolas Roeg eventually shot a drab version of the book for cable TV), but also because the only actual Hollywood film about Vietnam was John Wayne's embarrassment The Green Berets. By the time Apocalypse Now finally made it to theatres, several other films - The Deer Hunter, The Boys in Company C, Coming Home - had come out, preventing it from being the first real Vietnam movie. Going by the Academy Awards, which went to The Deer Hunter and Coming Home (and later Platoon), Apocalypse Now wasn't even one of the best Nam films, though it says something about the redundancy of the Oscars that they handed out a ton of statuettes to a TV movie like Kramer vs. Kramer rather than give any real accolades (it got some technical nods) to Coppola's epic vision.

At a first viewing, Apocalypse Now is so amazing that it's hard to form an opinion, though a great many audiences were so shell-shocked by the time the plot got to Marlon Brando that the (admittedly abstruse) finale fell flat. Two decades on, I still vividly remember the opening scenes of the 70 mm version, when the quadrophonic helicopters seemed to be flying through the darkened cinema before the jungle erupted into surreal flames and Jim Morrison's 'The End' segued into Martin Sheen freaking out in a hotel room and the voice-over that commences with the heartfelt 'Saigon ... shit!' Milius layered in bits of the Odyssey as well as Conrad, and the film is structured as a series of set-pieces along the river: the Air Cavalry attack on the Cong village so Col Kilgore (Robert Duvall) can capture a great surfing breakwater (with its Wagner accompaniment), the trip into the bush for mangos that climaxes with the sudden apeparance of a tiger, the Playboy bunnies performing in a jungle amphitheatre, the inadvertent massacre of a sampanful of peasants, the endless battle for a bridge blown up by night and built by day, Dennis Hopper's freaked-out photojournalist, and Brando's appearance as Kurtz, a tribal God in Cambodia reading T.S. Eliot and awaiting his murderer.

How many lines from Kramer vs Kramer can you remember? Apocalypse Now has entered the language; even now, people quote from it in certain situations: - 'a snail crawling along the edge of a straight razor' 'terminate with extreme prejudice' 'Charlie don't surf' 'I love the smell of napalm in the morning' 'never get out of the boat' 'even the jungle wanted him dead' 'a typical fucking Vietnam mission' 'you're an errand boy sent by grocers to collect a bill' 'the horror, the horror'. As Hearts of Darkness shows, the making of the movie - over-budget, with Ferdinand Marcos taking back his choppers to fight rebels, real-life Marine Harvey Kietel fired to bring in Martin Sheen, who nearly died of a heart attack, and Brando and Hopper improvising hours of nonsense as Coppola tried to make up his mind about the ending - is a part of the legend. It's an endlessly re-watchable film, and some stretches (especially the finale) make more sense on the third or fourth go-round. It may well have been the last truly great film to have been made on a mammoth budget, and it's as much a part of our collective film history as The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane and 2001.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Cable Guide (issue unknown)

Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com