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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 aspired to
greatness. The screenplay, first developed by Orson Welles but abandoned
in favor of Citizen Kane due to budgetary restraints, was worked
on by different people at various stages, including George Lucas, John
Milius and Coppola himself. It transferred 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 exactly constitutes
sane behavior in a war like this?
The purpose of the movie is clearly not to answer any of these questions.
You could call Apocalypse Now incoherent, but anybody who has
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 destroyed
sets, Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack, the Philippine government
rented Coppola the same helicopters it was using to fight rebels ten
miles away, Marlon Brando refused to do the movie after having received
an advance of $1 million, Coppola kept rewriting the script while they
were shooting it and the budget rose from $13 million to $31 million.
As Coppola famously put it when the movie was finally released to massive
acclaim at the Cannes film festival: '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 an entirtely 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 still
managed to transform himself into the psychotic Walter Kurtz, and Coppola
managed to pull everything together during the editing process (which
almost took a year in itself, cut down from nearly six hours). Still,
the original release version of Apocalypse Now was a project
finally abandoned rather than completed, and both Coppola and editor
Walter Murch commented increasingly in the years that followed that
they intended to revisit the picture at some point in future to create
a fuller, richer experience. The result of their efforts finally reached
the screens in 2001, retitled Apocalypse Now Redux and adding
49 minutes of previously deleted scenes, making for the suitably epic
total running time of 197 minutes. The reinstated footage lightens the
experience with a few homorous moments, as well as rather dreary pay-off
for the surreal Playmates' appearance, and the ghost-like French colonialist
sequence glimpsed in the Hearts of Darkness documentary. These
new scenes do add to the experience, enriching it with a little more
nuance and character detail, but the movie's main strengths remain unchanged:
the cinematography by Vittorio Storaro is second to none and Walter
Murch's revolutionary immersive sound design pulls you in right from
the first seconds. |
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Identical
releases of the original version of Apocalypse Now are available
from Paramount for Region 1 and Region 2 [see separate
review]. Similar bare-bones releases of the Redux version
are available for Region 1 and Region 2; the Dutch Region 2 release
from A-Film Home Entertainment served as a basis for this review.
Not
just re-edited but also painstakingly restored for this longer release,
the image presented on this DVD release looks much better than the original
cut's DVD transfer. 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 still the only director-approved
transfer. There is much less grain than on the previous DVD, and colors
seem much more fully saturated than the original release.
The soundtrack was the first to use Dolby's then brandnew quadrophonic
surround sound system, and legendary sound editor Walter Murch is the
first person to receive a 'sound designer' credit! The Dolby Digital
5.1 mix manages to improve on the already impressive previous DVD version,
with a fuller sound that yields better bass response and an increased
level of detail.
The
major problem with the extras is once again 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. Another disappointment with the Redux DVD release
is that there isn't even any extra material on board addressing the
changes between the initial release and the new version. There is so
much to tell about this film, the lack of any extras is truly infuriating.The
main menu screen is static and easy to navigate given the limited options.
Gerard
Castelein & Dan
Hassler-Forest
Reviewed: March
16, 2002
Click
here for IMDB info on Apocalypse
Now .
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