
The epic and often surrealistic chronicle of one U.S. Army Captain’s mission to head up a river during the Vietnam War and kill what lies at its end, be it a man…or something else.
When I first saw Francis Coppolla’s “Apocalypse Now,” it completely blew me away! Never before had I seen such a chaotic vision of war as was shown through the eyes of Captain Benjamin Willard. Having previously seen many other excellent war movies, from Saving Private Ryan to The Deer Hunter to Big Red One, and while these movies are all excellent and worthy contenders, Apocalypse Now seemed to take the conventions set for what war was like and said, “Fuck it.” Their was nothing conventional about Apocalypse Now, just as their was nothing conventional about the Vietnam War. To me, Willard’s journey to find Colonel Kurtz was a parrallel to our own struggle, going up our own rivers to find the darkness at the end. We may get their at the end, but what we find may not allow us to return unchanged, if we return at all. Martin Sheen’s performance was outstanding, to say nothing of Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, and the many other amazing actors who contributed to this film. It stands the test of time. People still stare with jaws dropped in disbelief and incomprehension as Willard practices some strange martial art in a drunken haze. The audience still hums and cheers along to “Flight of the Valkyries” as Col. Kilgore and his airmobile helicopters launch an assault on the waterfront village. The room grows silent with fear as in the recess of the slaughter of the cow, we see a bloody and dying Kurtz mutter his final, haunting words, “The horror. The horror,” ending the movie on a note of pure, open terror. And we shudder with cold fear. This film will still be talked about when we are dead and gone, because it is a film that redifined the way we looked at the Vietnam War, looked at movies themselves, and looked at ourselves.
By: Edward Brown