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| Martin
Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall,
Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Willard:
The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam, you needed wings to stay above
it.
An
army captain stationed in Saigon during the war is sent on a secret
mission to go deep into the jungle and assassinate a renegade colonel.
 Francis
Ford Coppola made some of the best movies during the seventies. He produced
milestones of contemporary cinema with The Godfather (I & II)
and The Conversation. Apocalypse Now was his last stand
as a filmmaker: an insanely megalomaniacal project that signalled the
end of an era and the last of Coppola's films that truly aspires to
greatness. The screenplay, first developed by Orson Welles but abandoned
in favor of Citizen Kane due to budgetary restratints, was worked
on by different people at various stages, including George Lucas, John
Milius and Coppola himself. It transferred the Joseph Conrad's novella
Heart Of Darkness from 1930s Africa to late 1960s Vietnam, and
serves as a metaphor for the descent into the madness of war for a generation
of Americans. Even better, it doesn't even depict a specific battle
or historical fact from the war, but instead becomes a hallucinatory
voyage down the river where Captain Willard (an intense performance
by Martin Sheen) and his crew encounter an alarming number of signposts
that things are not well with the American troops. Questions about humanity
and destiny are raised, and the whole idea of sanity: what is sane behavior
in a war?
The purpose of the movie is clearly not to answer any of these questions.
You could call Apocalypse Now incoherent, but anybody whose seen
the documentary Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
knows that things would have been quite different had everything gone
according to plan. Instead, the location shoot in the Phillipines spiralled
from a couple of weeks into almost two years, as typhoons destroy sets,
Martin Sheen suffers a heart attack, the Philippine government rents
Coppola the same helicopters it's using to fight rebels ten miles away,
Marlon Brando refuses to do the movie after having received an advance
of $1 million, Coppola keeps changing the script while they're shooting
and the budget rises from $13 million to $31 million. As Coppola famously
put it when the movie was finally released: 'We went into the jungle,
there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much
equipment and little by little we went insane.'
 Narrative
coherence was therefore one of the last things on Coppola's mind: this
was to be an epic on a whole new scale, and most of the original script
went out the window with that new goal in sight. This was no longer
a movie, this was for real as Coppola himself went through some sort
of epiphany and threatened suicide on numerous occasions. Marlon Brando
eventually turned up late, drunk and overweight but somehow morphs into
the psychotic Walter Kurtz and Coppola managed to pull everything together
during the editing (which almost took a year in itself, cut down from
nearly six hours). It may be his greatest achievement on this movie.
And what ended up on screen is amazing, maybe not to be adored but certainly
to be admired: the cinematography by Vittorio Storaro is second to none
and the sound effects pull you in right from the first seconds. |
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Region
1 and Region 2 releases are identical.
Given
the fact this DVD is produced by American Zoetrope (they have their
own DVD mastering plant now as I understand it) you can safely say this
transfer comes with the approval of Coppola himself. After being taken
aback by the foggy-looking triple process shot that opens the movie,
the quality on display in the rest of the movie made me realize I was
really seeing it for the first time. The anamorphic transfer represents
the 70mm ratio of approximately 2:1 that was used for the film's first
major run. As it was blown up from anamorphic 35mm which has a wider
aspect ratio, the edges sometimes look overcropped, but this is the
only director-approved transfer. There are some flaws in the source
print but the level of detail and especially the colors are totally
amazing.
The soundtrack was the first to use Dolby's then brand new quadrophonic
surround sound system, and legendary sound editor Walter Murch is the
first person to receive a 'sound designer credit! The new 5.1 Dolby
Digital mix carefully reproduces the film's revolutionary surround field.
This movie defined how movies can create an immersive, totally three-dimensional
sound space, and it's still reference quality material for contemporary
sound designers. The dialogues and voice-over narration are clear and
understandable, which is quite amazing with all hell breaking loose
in some scenes.
The
major problem with the extras is of course the fact that the documentary
Hearts Of Darkness is absent from this release. Various copyright
issues have led to this situation and I hope it will be rectified in
the future. But apart from that I had a great time with the extras,
as they round up some loose ends that I wasn't aware of before. Excerpts
from the original theatrical program can be read with some backgound
on the shooting of the movie (a sanitized version of course). This printed
program was used instead of a credits sequence during the film's initial
limited release. When the film got a nationwide release it went to 35mm
and a special black-and-white 3 minute credit sequence with music was
added (available as a separate item on the DVD). The destruction of
the Kurtz compound (also known as the alternate ending) is available
for viewing, with some insightful commentary by Francis Ford Coppola.
There's also the original theatrical trailer.
By the way, sound designer Walter Murch has been quoted as saying he
is working on an extended cut of Apocalypse Now that may be released
theatrically and get a subsequent reissue on DVD. The project is tentatively
slated to be completed in 2001.  The
animated main menu screen looks great, with helicopters flying by and
the jungle exploding in flames, all in sync with the movie. The other
screens are accessed by the filing system, and are all expertly designed.
Gerard
Castelein
Reviewed: 2001
Click
here for IMDB info on Apocalypse
Now .
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