Apocalypse Now Redux

Rating:
Summary: Apocalypse Now - Regurg
Review: The additional footage ruined this masterpiece. It detracted from Willard's focus on Kurtz and preparing himself to carry out his mission (i.e., to become like Kurtz in order to kill Kurtz). The psychological state of the characters is the focus of the second half of the movie. The fact the story is set in Vietnam becomes irrelevant after the crew passes the bridge. Breaking the flow of the relentless regression back to a primitive state in order to bury Clean and bring yet another philosophical discussion of the war into the story was misplaced and tedious at best. Placing Willard in the tiger cage disconnected the beheading of Chef as the last straw in motivating Willard to complete his mission. And the crew getting busy with the bunnies was down right stupid. A huge thumbs up for the soundtrack though.

Rating:
Summary: 'Redux' brings us back down the river in style
Review: The first time I saw "Apocalypse Now", it was on the tiny TV in my parent's bedroom. The sound was horrible, the film wasn't letterboxed, and my fifteen years on the planet were not enough to appreciate the scope of the film. Thus, my memories of the movie were always clouded by this brutal experience; that it was drab and too long and terribly boring. Recently, more than ten years since that infamous first time, I got a chance to see the new director's cut (ahem, the "Redux" version) in an IMAX theatre with glorious digital sound. I was blown away by what was probably the most viscerally intense moviegoing experience of my life.

Eleanor Coppola's stunning documentary, "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse", would lead you to believe that hubby Francis' final product was a rambling mess of a movie. It's a backstage document of the production's rambling improv scenes, budget overruns, recuts, and on-the-fly script revisions... how can all of this lead to a coherent movie? Well it does. Every moment is savoured, every shot perfectly composed, every line of dialogue a perfect fit to the overall narrative (even Brando's incoherence toes the line). Within the movie's perfect whole, Coppolla also managed to capture some truly sublime moments: Robert Duvall's Col. Kilgore, unflinching even at the centre of a storm of explosions; the two men trying to hang on to the Playboy-copter, as it makes its getaway; heavy enemy fire emerging suddenly from the forest; the naked bodies hanging from the trees in Kurtz' compound; Sheen rising from the river, face painted camouflage; and Kurtz, lost in his book of poetry, realizing he's not alone and turning towards Willard with supreme awareness of what is about to happen. These are moments that can be appreciated on an intellectual, aesthetic, and visceral level. Wondrous!

My favourite part, or parts, was Coppola's dual use of the Doors' song, "The End". In the beginning, it introduces the languid pace of the film's first half, and alludes to the horrors to come. In the end, Coppola's cuts Kurtz' murder scene perfectly to the rising rhythms of the song's denouement, intersplicing shots of a ritual bull slaughter for good measure. The song's themes of madness, incest, and murder dovetail nicely with the film's themes.

The cast is uniformly perfect. Martin Sheen doesn't say much, but he does get to brood and contemplate quite openly, letting the audience into his thought process. And his voiceover narration, in that wonderfully deep and resonant voice, is the most effective use of that tired technique that I can remember. Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper bestow mountains of comedic energy to the film's first and last halves respectively. Duvall, as the whacked out commanding officer who receives the love of his men even when his methods are unsound, is a pillar of strength. Hopper on the other hand, is beaten down physically and mentally, as a photojournalist who's spent too much time in Kurtz' warped company. And Marlon Brando, overweight, bald, and mumbling, manages to portray a perfect end to Col. Kurtz' life. There are those who bemoan Brando's performance as self-indulgent and nearly insane, but if you think about it, aren't these the best adjectives to use to describe the Colonel himself? Brando nails it.

As for the additional scenes, added to the "Redux" version, they mostly work. The stealing Kilgore's surfboard scene is a truly giddy moment, but it is more important in that it colours Willard as a doer rather than just a passenger along for the ride in the film's first half. And it gives the boat a perfect reason for being caught in the thick jungle, right before Chef sees the tiger. The second Playboy Bunny scene wonderfully contrasts fantasy with reality. Chef and Johnson take their turns with the girls (the one dressing up his girl to look like another Bunny he's obsessed with; the other dressing up his girl in camouflage), in the midst of a muddy downpour. It's hardly a romantic scene; in fact, it's just the opposite, especially with Clean lurking around, noisily waiting for his turn. These scenes worked. The French Plantation sequence doesn't. It starts out fine, detailing a ragged funeral. But the later dinner scene, which redundantly identifies the movie's main themes (clumsily, I might add), does so with endless prattle that eventually degenerates into needless whining. This is the one sequence in the whole film that bored me.

Other than this one flaw, "Apocalypse Now Redux" is a perfect movie. Do yourself a favour and check out the film in the grandest and most technologically advanced theatre you can find. It's the only way to do the film justice.

Rating:
Summary: More Than A Movie- A Work of Art!
Review: When Apocalypse Now was first released in 1979 it was a work of art. It was a great hypocrisy when the Academy Awards voted Kramer vs. Kramer the best picture of 1979. 22 years later, Apocalypse Now is regarded as a work of art. It spawned a successful documentary ("Hearts of Darkeness"), is required viewing in film schools and is overall regarded one of the greatest films of all-time. 22 years later, few people remember "Kramer vs. Kramer". With my academy dissing aside, I must say that viewing this film in a theatre is a totally mesmerizing experience, more than viewing a movie, it is witnessing an event, a work of art. For those who have seen the original "Apocalypse Now", you will want to see this new version for the additional footage and the big screen experience. The color and the sound are nothing short flawless. For those who have never seen the original film, they should come prepared for the experience of thier lives. Words alone cannont describe "Apocalypse Now Redux."

Rating:
Summary: AWESOME
Review: This movie is Great. I own it on VHS and just sawit in theaters today and what a great movie. I will have to dust off my VHS version and start watching it some more. "I love the smell of Napalm in the Morning!" what a fantastic line. Great movie go see it NOW.

Rating:
Summary: Pro-Redux
Review: I was fortunate to see Apocalypse Now Redux early this afternoon. It has been a wish of mine that I would get to see this film on the big screen for many years. I have viewed it numerous times on video, laserdisc, DVD, and bootleg work-prints but seeing Coppola's epic on the big screen has not only changed the way I view Apocalypse Now but the way I view all films. Never have I seen a film benefit more from being projected on the silver screen. There is so much to see that cannot be seen on our televisions no matter how great the resolution. The detail and the colors are overwhelming. This is a film made before home video consumption. Coppola had an eye for the big screen not the small box. Seeing ANR in the theater is akin to seeing a whole new film no matter how many times you have see it at home. I have seen the additional scenes before in poor quality work-prints. Most of the added material works perfectly and what doesn't is of minor concern. It seems that many do not care for the Playmate sequence. I for one found the scene profoundly disturbing. My problem is with the music that plays during a conversation between Willard and a French woman who has taken a liking to him. It is REALLY out of place. I understand that the whole French colony is out of place but the music just does not work. Seeing Apocalypse Now is more important than ever. Film-goers have put up with some awful cinematic experiences over the years. I won't mention my personal list of garbage but your list will pass through your mind when you watch ANR. When I wasn't lost in the beauty of "the horror" I wondered how filmmakers could watch ANR and make the dreck that fills our cinematic lives. I'm not talking about the little B-movie quickies. I am talking about the lousy big budget directors that pass their movies off as great, the kind of filmmaker that blows enough money to feed a small country on empty "art". How do they do it? How can you watch this film and produce nothing? I can't remember when a film has made me so thankful to be alive.

Rating:
Summary: The redux adds almost nothing to the original
Review: Some of the new stuff was just plain silly, including another encounter with the Playboy bunnies. The only thing that the redux really adds is a scene in which Brando reads news clippings to Martin Sheen, and even then the value is limited. Still a great movie worth seeing on the wide screen, but don't expect cinemagraphic satori.

Rating:
Summary: The Greatest War Movie Of All Time Better Than Ever
Review: Apocalypse Now is the greatest war film of all time, and now it is back in the theaters. This epic film on the Insanity of War picked a perfect topic: Vietnam. Martin Sheen is Captain Willard, a soldier with a shady past and a deadly mission: kill renegade Colonel Kurtz with extreme prejudice. Through this journey he will encounter the psychotic Kilgore, the worldly crew of his patrol boat, who are all archetypes, and Kurtz himself. The new version contains almost an hour of new footage. It is going to be worth it, though. Look for Harrison Ford in a small role as an intelligence officer.

Rating:
Summary: "The Horror...The Horror"
Review: We have all heard about the difficulties Francis Ford Coppola experienced during the creation of what will be the movie he is most remembered for, 1979's "Apocalypse Now": A typhoon wiped out his sets in Asia. Star Martin Sheen suffered a minor heart attack during filming. Marlon Brando was Marlon Brando. The film's portrayal of war as madness often mirrored the problems involved in filming an epic about America's involvement in the Vietnam conflict. Until "Apocalypse Now Redux" arrived on the scene a year or two ago, we never saw the full cut of the film. Well, "Redux" still doesn't contain everything since Coppola supposedly lensed miles of film stock, but this version contains several brand new sequences as well as extensions of existing scenes not seen in the original. Coppola supposedly stated that his film, "Isn't about the Vietnam War; It IS the Vietnam War." As far as I know, the director never fought in that conflict, so this claim is spurious at best. What you will get from the film, though, is an immersion in the blackest of nightmares through the performances of some of the finest actors in Hollywood. "Apocalypse Now" in any form is a must see picture.

Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is probably not the best person suited for a top-secret mission. When we first see the man, he is in a hotel room in Saigon slowly going mad, the stresses of war having taken a terrible toll on his mental and physical being. His mission, if he chooses to accept it, is to track down a military officer named Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) and terminate him "with extreme prejudice." It seems the good colonel went insane up in the jungle, built up a mercenary army, began transmitting bizarre rants about snails crawling on the edge of a razor, and thus threatens the American war effort. The high command cannot have an officer carrying out his own warped whims in the bush, so Willard is to go up the Mekong River in a patrol boat and track Kurtz down. The captain accepts the order, obviously, and thus begins a journey into the darkest corners of Vietnam. During the lengthy trip, Willard reads extensively from Kurtz's military files, learning that his target once represented one of America's best and brightest soldiers, a man educated at top universities whose career track was paved with gold. How could such a brilliant man go completely over the edge? Willard tries to figure it all out.

Captain Willard has plenty of time to ponder the enigmatic Kurtz during the trip. The boat sails into one bizarre scene after another, some fraught with peril while others are just plain strange. Willard and the crew briefly spend time with the hyper macho Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), an officer in the Air Cavalry who likes to blare Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" over his helicopter gunship's speakers while reducing a Vietcong stronghold to rubble. It is Duvall's character that utters the immortal line "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" as he urges his men to surf the ocean waves in a combat zone. The weirdness doesn't stop here, as Willard and his crew witness a show put on by Playboy Playmates at a riverside supply depot, visit a plantation proudly maintained by a French family, and stumble over an isolated river bridge under constant enemy bombardment defended by American soldiers with no idea who is in charge. The final showdown between Kurtz and Willard is not only the most powerful sequence in the film; it is one of the most intriguing parts of any film ever made.

It is no secret "Apocalypse Now" closely mirrors Joseph Conrad's novella "Heart of Darkness." Too, Coppola's film is so obviously an attempt to show how the war permanently altered America's self-perception that I don't need to spend time discussing that theme. What has always drawn me so deeply into this movie is the acting, of course, but also the "madness" of Colonel Kurtz. Is the rogue officer really insane? By what standards? According to what we saw on the journey up the river, can we call what Kurtz is doing insane? I don't think so. As much as we might cringe at the colonel's "horror and moral terror" speech, anyone with an ounce of sense should realize that that is exactly how a nation should fight a war. Rules and laws developed in civilization must automatically fly out the window when the soldiers march off to battle. Kurtz recognizes America will lose the war because his country burdens its soldiers with pointless rules-like not allowing pilots to paint an offensive word on the side of aircraft, for example. You see the same thing in Oliver Stone's "Platoon" when an officer rambles on about an "illegal killing," as though you can place an arbitrary value hierarchy on what goes on in a war zone and still think about winning. War is screaming, mind-shattering insanity, not a game with strictly defined parameters that any one side should follow. Kurtz is "mad" because his training prevents him from embracing the Vietnamese conception of the "moral" soldier.

If you haven't seen this movie, what are you waiting for? "Redux" adds nearly an hour to the film's original runtime, the picture quality looks great, and Coppola's beast contains the best dialogue in cinematic history. My favorite line in the film? Anything Kurtz utters, but especially the "moral terror" speech and his response to Willard's adamant claims about being a soldier instead of an assassin: "You're neither. You're an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill." Moreover, you get to see plenty of actors show off their stuff, including Harrison Ford, G.D. Spradlin, Dennis Hopper, Laurence Fishburne, and Frederic Forrest. You need to move this one up to the top of your list immediately.

Rating:
Summary: most boring movie
Review: this movie is boring to watch and i fell asleep in it twice. its is overrated. save your self 3 hours and dont watch or buy it. the helicopter scene was overrated and the movie itself was just plain dull.

Rating:
Summary: boring ?!?!
Review: I find that the people complaining about this film have missed the point. Its NOT the theatrical version its NOT platoon its NOT full metal jacket, why are they expecting it to be so? Watch the other films then?!?!? This film is one man's glimpse into hell, in particular, the vietnam war experience. It shows how war and the idea of propaganda of wartime to make the government look good etc while good men die make people go mad. It shows the horror of war. After viewing this film I find in NO way it to be boring. I find the complainers comments to be sad and a reflection on them that they might be boring. This is a brilliant film and was NEVER supposed to be a shoot em up hollywood epic. Going into this expecting lots of action is like going into burger king for a pizza. Cmon folks...get a grip on reality! This film is a mind trip. Plain and simple. See its brilliance for what it is, a NEW version! Director's cut if you will but it's NEVER been seen like this. Its new, its refreshing and the new scenes add some "quirky" aspects but meld together well with the original film. For any fans of the orignal that want the original why go here, click the back button and buy the OTHER version. Nuff said.
Brilliant film, Brilliant acting, Brilliant NEW version. Period.