Apocalypse Now

Buy This Item Apocalypse Now by Paramount  Available from Amazon  $14.95  on 9-22-2008     In the tradition of such obsessively driven directors as Erich von Stroheim and Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola approached the production of <i>Apocalypse Now</i> as if it were his own epic mission into the heart of darkness. On location in the storm-ravaged Philippines, he quite literally went mad as the project threatened to devour him in a vortex of creative despair, but from this insanity came one of the greatest films ever made. It began as a John Milius screenplay, transposing Joseph Conrad's classic story "Heart of Darkness" into the horrors of the Vietnam War, following a battle-weary Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) on a secret upriver mission to find and execute the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has reverted to a state of murderous and mystical insanity. The journey is fraught with danger involving wartime action on epic and intimate scales. One measure of the film's awesome visceral impact is the number of sequences, images, and lines of dialogue that have literally burned themselves into our cinematic consciousness, from the Wagnerian strike of helicopter gunships on a Vietnamese village to the brutal murder of stowaways on a peasant sampan and the unflinching fearlessness of the surfing warrior Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who speaks lovingly of "the smell of napalm in the morning." Like Herzog's <i>Aguirre: The Wrath of God</i>, this film is the product of genius cast into a pit of hell and emerging, phoenix-like, in triumph. Coppola's obsession (effectively detailed in the riveting documentary <i>Hearts of Darkness</i>, directed by Coppola's wife, Eleanor) informs every scene and every frame, and the result is a film for the ages. <i>--Jeff Shannon</i> Reader Reviews I think the original version of Apocalypse Now is vastly superior to the needlessly long Redux, although the additional scenes of the latter (the French plantation, Playboy bunnies, Willard stealing the surfboard) are interesting in and of themselves. So now we can have both, in a single, bargain-priced and handsomely packaged edition. As with most DVDs, the bonus deleted scenes are pretty much a waste of time, although they do help a person understand the choices Coppola made in editing, and in that sense, it really drives home the magnitude of his achievement in creating the original masterpiece. I don't like that the movie is broken into two parts; why couldn't they have put the original on one disc, and Redux on the other? But then again, in a long movie most people have to take a bathroom break at some point anyway, and the sampan massacre is an appropriately dramatic scene with which to end part one. All told, The Apocalypse Now Complete Dossier 2-disc special edition is well worth buying.

Apocalypse Now Available from Amazon Price: $14.95 Updated on 9-22-2008.

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