Apocalypse Now: A Beautiful Spectacle of Insanity

Rewatching Francis Ford Coppola's infamous and legendary Apocalypse Now, a quote from another movie came to mind: "As the world fell, each of us, in our own way, was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy....me or everyone else." I've seen this movie a couple of times now; the three-and-a-half hour redux cut then, and the two-and-a-half hour theatrical cut now. Both versions accomplish different things and the same thing. The theatrical version is more streamlined, yet the redux dives into Coppola's already-rich world in ways that make it seem that much more complete. Either way, Apocalypse Now remains a masterpiece of cinema, no matter which way you slice the water buffalo. A loose adaptation of the Heart of Darkness novella, it's a Vietnam-war-adjacent film that follows US Army Captain Willard and his crew's near-hallucinogenic foray into Cambodia to assassinate an insane rogue Colonel by the name of Kurtz. And between the napalm bombing runs and the animal sacrifices, one thing that really impressed me about this movie was its ability to mix recognizable-enough history with the trappings of a strangely pagan horror show. Hold the popcorn, please.

Apocalypse Now possesses the quality of a dream. It's strange and intoxicatingly jarring from its opening moments, a cinematic acid trip through the jungles of the far east that makes for quite possibly the definitive psychological drama. We're thrown right into the deep end of the crazy pool and immediately immersed in Willard's insanity, left only to wonder what horrors could have caused it. Fear not or fear a lot, you'll find out. Throughout this movie, Willard monologues via eerie and almost dissociative voiceovers, a haunting cherry on top of a perfectly poetic portrait of a broken man who's seen too much. One of my favorite elements of Apocalypse Now, these voiceovers always manage to sound conversational, like you're sitting in a circle and listening to a story told by a truly troubled man rather than merely listening to an actor recite lines from a screenplay.

I know it's cliche to call a movie ahead of its time. Too often, we'll slap any great classic film with that label without taking the time to acknowledge that great films were made yesterday, are made today, and will be made tomorrow. However, Apocalypse Now deserves the title in every sense of the phrase, not because it's simply a well-written movie, but because it's also a visual feast. Its cinematography is lush and eye-popping. Mute the distinctly 1970s soundtrack, and the immaculately clear and colorful visuals could have fooled me into thinking this movie was made in the early 2000s if I didn't know better. They perfectly complement perhaps the best production design I've ever seen in a movie. Coppola spares absolutely no expense in ways that will make you wonder if he was himself going mad. Helicopters, boats, and tanks - all of them one-hundred percent real - putter about searching for Charlie (a slang term for the Viet Cong). As much as we love classic movies, there often exists in them a barrier of unrealism erected by their technological limitations. This simply isn't the case with Apocalypse Now, an unbelievably immersive experience that visually outdoes any other classic movie I've seen while staying weird; beach assaults mixed with surfboards will be strange in any context.

Apocalypse Now is a dark movie. Kurtz hangs over this entire film like an eerie, mysterious cloud threatening to rain; this movie's insistence on teaching us to fear him from the very beginning left a big impression on me. We're initially given only a photograph of the man, a handful of his disconcerting voice recordings, and a slew of macabre facts. The dreamlike tone of this movie makes it feel like Kurtz is always present, as if he could be listening in the next room, waiting for the right chance to influence others with his often-maniacal ideology. He'd have less work cut out for him with some characters than with others. Of course, Kurtz himself is insane, but much of the US military doesn't seem far behind on the road to madness. Take Lieutenant Kilgore, for instance, a nonchalantly coldhearted and seemingly psychopathic officer who leaves custom playing cards on the bodies of dead civilians as a calling card of sorts. He's supposed to be the "good guy," whatever that means in the armpit of the world. Between its troubled, intriguing characters and battle sequences operating on a massive scale, Apocalypse Now manages to feel both grand and intimate; grand because of its scale, intimate because of its scope. Its pinpoint narrative accuracy and intentional characterization prevent it from spiraling off into mere spectacle, not to say that this movie doesn't rightfully indulge its technical achievements.

Like so many other aspects of this movie, the battle sequences of Apocalypse Now are years ahead of their time in nearly every way, from clever sound design incorporating tense helicopter pilot chatter to fantastic and practically done explosions and military gear. The soundtrack itself remains evocative of movies from the 70s, but the visuals are so far ahead of their time that it makes for a jarring audio-visual experience. It sounds relatively old, yet looks relatively new. In general, this movie is strange. You'll see things you wouldn't see in another war film or psychological drama. It's a peculiar whiplash of visceral combat, ominous promises of a mad colonel somewhere in the jungle, and even bawdy USO shows on top of it all. Apocalypse Now takes every last military movie cliché you could think of, throws it in the blender, and hits puree. With each passing minute, every element of this movie blends more into the others, making them less and less distinguishable. Being built around a boat journey downriver, Apocalypse Now is practically an on-rails horror show, a carnival ride of thrills, chills, and brutality.

Rounding all of this insanity out, every character in this movie brings something different to the table. War is dangerous, and not everyone makes it back alive. How much more dangerous would it be if a dangerous pagan cult were target number one instead of Charlie? But when someone dies in Apocalypse Now, you feel the hole they leave behind. This movie takes ample time to demonstrate how exactly each boat crew member affects the team as a whole, so if even one cog is missing, the machine never quite runs the same way again, which isn't to say that it runs out of steam. It's intoxicating from beginning to end, quite unlike any movie made before it, and too impactful for any movie after it to copy elements and hope for the same impact. It's an insane movie about an insane time in our history and the insane ways that we dealt with it. One of my favorite moments in the movie features Kurtz railing against the irony that the military recruits young men to drop bombs on people but won't even let them write curse words on their airplanes for fear of offending someone. He may be insane, but he's never entirely wrong. At its best, Apocalypse Now forces you to ask yourself hard questions, the very best of which make it hard to tell who's crazier: Kurtz...or everybody else.

Many movies have been made on the topics of war and insanity, but few - even none - have been able to blend these concepts as effectively as Apocalypse Now did. This movie is a macabre downhill descent into insanity that features daring character decisions, an intelligent and methodical pace, and some of the most outstanding production design I've ever seen in a movie. This is a movie that feels both big and yet intensely focused on the psyche of Willard. We know he's going insane in more ways than one, and it's often all too uncomfortably easy to understand why. Even the crew that worked on  Apocalypse Now ended up suffering from some level of insanity. The cursed production of this film is the stuff of legends. From a real water buffalo being killed on-screen to typhoons repeatedly destroying sets to a massively ballooning budget to rampant drug and alcohol addiction among the cast and crew, it's incredible that Apocalypse Now even saw the light of day. Growing up, this is the movie you heard everyone talk about but no one elaborate on. I guess I was too young to know at the time. Even today, one can't help but feel that rarely has a movie ever ended with a more fitting line.

The horror...the horror.

Apocalypse Now - 10/10

Jeremiah 10:1-5