Apocalypse Now Redux

Rating:
Summary: ONE OF THE BEST FILMS EVER, BUT "THE HORROR" IS THE DVD
Review: Apocalypse Now Redux is amazing, the movie is great, some people say that some of the new additions are useless and boring, but they are not at all, the French Plantation scene was fairly good I think, very informative about the war in fact, the scene with the Playboy bunnies was, well, a bit exaggerated, but it was funny, at lest to me it was, plus, that scene it's not that long anyway. This was and will always be a masterpiece, some people say that now the film was ruined. Apocalypse Now Redux has been one of the greatest movies in history, with a great cast, Marlon Brando is memorable as Kurtz, plus he gets you to think, Robert Duvall was great as Kilgore, short but very good, Martin Sheen is amazing, from the opening scene all the way to the last, he really makes the movie flow, you hardly notice the 3 hours, you don't feel that the movie is too long, plus Dennis Hopper makes a great contribution, and in case you haven't notice, Mr Clean on the boat is 17 year old Laurence Fishburne, and the guy with glasses in the briefing room when Martin Sheen is told his assignment, that is Harrison Ford, also, even Francis Ford Coppola makes a cameo appearance, the film director when Martin Sheen gets to the beach, he was filming the soldiers and telling them to pretend they were fighting. What more can you ask, plus the film is amazing, the cinematography, the soundtrack, the story, the actors, the acting, everything. What you can ask is more special features on the DVD, again Paramount ruins it, the DVD only has a trailer, what is that, this movie deserves a better treatment, try a commentary, featurettes, documentaries, like the "Heart of Darkness", which is of the book on what Coppola based the movie, something, but just a trailer, they say that people learn from their mistakes, like Braveheart, The Untouchables, and all the other DVD editions with nothing, when Enemy at the Gates was released in DVD, I though that finally Paramount had learned, the version had enough special features to make us like the movie even more, but again, they take the wrong course with Apocalypse Now Redux, buy the movie, is amazing, but don't expect any special feature. "The Horror" is what Paramount makes us go through with their DVD editions, it looks like they don't have "The Strength" to get better DVD editions, the movie "Smells like Victory", but not the DVD.

Rating:
Summary: Phenomenal -- fills in a lot of gaps. Best movie ever...
Review: Citizen Kane the best movie ever made? For some, maybe. For me, it's now definitely Apocalypse Now Redux. The original movie hovered in my Top 10, but with the addition of previously cut footage, a lot of continuity has been restored, and the movie makes more sense. I also like the new ending, which is more appropriate. The DVD version, which is have seen, is simply majestic. The moody percussion-driven background soundtrack (not including Wooly Bully, etc.) was performed by Mickey Hart and friends from the Grateful Dead, and, as always, helps give the visual images a dark, forboding sense of what is to come. A entire act, set at a hold-out French family's middle-of-nowhere plantation, gives new texture to the movie, and a new perspective on Martin Sheen's character. Great sound, great visuals, and FINALLY I learn how a patrol gunboat can make it so far upriver on one tank of gas -- there is an added scene where gas is obtained, and then some of it traded for frolics with the USO Miss America retinue. So much has been added. More about surfing and Robert Duval's obsession has been added. I could go on and on, but won't. I have this DVD as my No. 1 desire on this year's Christmas list. My second choice doesn't even come close. If you're one of those who hesitate to buy a movie until you've seen it, then go find and rent this. I guarantee you'll be buying it, or asking for it as a gift. It's a true masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: A Haunting Film of the Horrors of War.
Review: Apocalypse Now. Where do I start? First of all. anyone who has seen any of Francis Ford Coppola's films knows that they are almost always great. But, besides The Godfather Trilogy, this is most certainly Coppola's masterpiece.

This film stars Martin Sheen as Willard, a soldier in the Vietnam War. Marlon Brando plays Kurtz, who was on his way to having a huge military career, but for unknown reasons, created a following of people up the Mekong River that poses a threat to the U.S. military. Willard is informed of the situation, and is given the mission to find Kurtz and "terminate" his position there. Willard is told that he shall kill Kurtz on a charge of murder. As he makes the journey to find Kurtz, Willard encounters
a chopper pilot who loves to surf(Robert Duvall), among other things.

The pacing of this film is perfect. At the beginning, everything seems like a military mission. But as time progresses and you see the horrors of the Vitnam War, this no longer seems like a mission. It is now a mythical journey in which the hero must destroy a former hero who has now proclaimed himself king. Also, when the mission begins, the dangers are man vs. man, but later on, it becomes man vs. nature. When you finally meet Kurtz, Marlon Brando pulls off the performance with absolute perfection.
He has gone crazy, but he is still a very calm man. Realizing that man is just a plaything of nature, plus having to endure the Vietnam War, Kurtz has established himself as a god, doing as he wishes with all the surrounding people. Some join him, others fear his reign. Kurtz thinks he has outdone nature. And maybe he has.

All in all, this is the best movie about the Vietnam War ever. It is also about how the need to survive can drive a sane man to insanity, even if what he has seen makes him question whether or not he wishes to survive.

Rating:
Summary: How to ruin a classic
Review: I saw this when it was first released in theatres over 20 years ago and have watched it 10 times on VHS over the years. Its a great film. A truly great, magnificent film that permanently expanded the "war genre".

This version undermines the classic with scenes that SHOULD have been left on the cutting room floor. Remember the surfing scene? "I love the smell of naplam in the morning..." right? Well now it ends when Willard and Lance run away from a wacky Robert Duval and they steal his surfboard! Next scene the boat is hiding under tree cover with a First Airborne chopper overhead with loudspeakers as Duval pleads "Please give back my surfboard." Boooooo....
Remember the Playboy Bunnies? In this version our heroes in a boat find them up river at a muddy tent camp in the rain and trade diesel fuel to screw them. Boooo....
And then there is the scene where young Larry Fisburne rants about a GI, his Playboy magazines and the person who ridiculed them until the GI shot him". Larry's (excuse me, Lawrence's) mom must be the only person who voted that scrap of celluloid out of the trash can.

Redux? I'd call it regurgitation. I'll take my Apocalypse "standard classic light", thank you very much.

Rating:
Summary: Shattering Encounter with the past
Review: Having been an undergraduate-graduate-post graduate during the entire VietNam period, it was not possible for me to watch Apocalyse Now when first released, even though it was then seven years since the war ended. The entire VietnNam era is, for many of us, the defining moment of our generation. Talking with my now adult children (who are now older than I was when the war ended) I realize how totally incapable they are of understanding not only the war itself, but American history, politics and culture. Events of the immediate past (i.e. 9/11) seem to be unfathomable. Without a comprehensive understanding of our history, how could it be otherwise?

To many of us, there was never so much as a centilla of doubt that the VietNam war was sheer, total insanity. Looking at Coppola's work at this remove brought back a welter of emotions and memories like a very bad acid trip. Coppola has caught the essence of the zeitgeist to perfection. Since I have not (and will not) see the original version, I can not compare version "A" to version "B." Judging purely on the basis of version "B" I can say that this film will either ring entirely true to the core, or it will baffle you thoroughly. In this one instance, this fictionalized history-as-allegory does not trivialize or make mawkish, or be plainly disprespectful to the subject.

I've read of the apparent inconclusiveness of the end of the film, of the dramatic and logical murk surrounding the final appearance of Kurz (Marlon Brando). It seemed perfectly logical to me, in a Lewis Carroll sort of way. VietNam was NOT about logic, and was certainly NOT about patriotism or fighting for democracy. I can still see Lyndon Johnson's face on Huntley-Brinkley, and those late night pictures of self-immolation clearly in my mind. Time has not diminished the horror of it all.

It's good to see a "war" movie portraying things as they were perceived by the entire generation. The only other film of this genre that I can think of in the same breath would have to be "King of Hearts"- which, in its more symbolic theater of the absurd manner of presentation, is also as horrifying. I would recommend viewing both of these films back to back.

Rating:
Summary: Coppola's instincts were right first time round.
Review: I want my old 'Apocalypse Now' back! There is always an assumption with directors' cuts (e.g. 'Blade Runner') that they are somehow more definitive and authentic than original studio-released versions. Unlike Ridley Scott, though, Coppola released the film he wanted, and it was a masterpiece, no matter how deeply flawed. 20 years on, with 'Redux', we are asked to replace the artistic credentials of someone who had just made the two 'Godfather' films and 'The Conversation', with someone who has recently made 'Jack'. Think about it.

It's not enough to say that the extra 49/53 minutes of footage don't add anything to the film. With the exception of increased pace (and much-needed defamiliarisation of a now-cliched first hour), they don't. However, they do detract from it badly. They destroy the atmosphere, momentum and slow-burning rhythms of the film. 'Apocalypse Now' is often accused of being a fudge of its source, Conrad's novella 'Heart of Darkness', but it is at its best when it follows it, in the last third, with Willard and the steamer approaching Kurtz. The movement of the film has been from that of the 'official' army world of rhetoric, explanations, documents, missions, voiceovers, precision of place ('Still in Saigon') to a primitive, timeless world of rituals, heavy gestures, silence - a dark, pseudo-Wagnerian spectacle of ritual sacrifice/suicide, fire and Gods' twilight. The pace of the movie definitively changes into the hallucinatory and spectral in this third.

This sense is utterly destroyed in 'Redux' by the two long, pointless insertions of new footage: the frolics with the stranded Bunnies and the tedious French plantation scene, which latter seems like a desperate effort to add 'analysis', psychology and a political viewpoint to a movie that has shown no interest in these things, and which seems like a concession to today's 'softer' expectations than the hard attitudes of the 70s. Like 'Heart of Dearkness', 'Now' saturates a non-Western environment with a decadent Western consciousness - it is not interested in Vietnam, but the American heart of darkness, mindlessly spreading itself wherever it goes, with Kurtz handing it over to Willard as in a relay race. The new scenes destroy all the good work Coppola did to link Kurtz and Willard, especially those dimly illuminated shots of their heads fading in and out of the darkness.

'Now' was always a flawed film. Too often it filled in its black holes with the sound and fury of hollow spectacle, signifying nothing, when it is in these holes the film's own heart lay. Certain set-pieces, such as the Valkyrie helicopters seeming to carry the waves with them over the horizon, are impressive enough, but it is the still, nerve-wrackingly slow creep up river that is the most unforgettable. The appearances of Brando and Hopper drag the film into pure camp.

Thematically 'Now' was always facile, its cmparisons of US military decadence and American society in general barely rising above undergraduate petulance; it certainly never achieves the rigorous analysis of the American military mentality Sirk conducted in 'Battle Hymn' (proof of this is in the way critics, in the light of 'recent events', have compared Kurtz to Bin-Laden, when the whole point of the story is that Kurtz is a model American). Coppola is a sensuous director: he makes you feel the moral darkening and mental breadown of an American professional, he doesn't ask you to comprehend it. The new footage tries to do just that, and simply exposes the intellectual shallowness of the film, while making it narratively more conventional. In fact, the most original and satisfying element of 'Apocalypse Now' remains Walter Murch's brilliantly inventive sound-design.

Rating:
Summary: The Madness of Vietnam is Truly Exposed This Time Around
Review: Some of the extra footage (lengthy though it was) was pretty entertaining and helped convey whatever message Coppola was sending. Some of it might have been just boring. As for me, I'm in the army at Ft Bragg and without a doubt, my favorite additional footage had to have been the flooded out medical unit that had water buffalo grazing about. These were not just any buffalo , for they had "Buffalo, U.S. Army, 1 Ea" stenciled on the side. NOW THAT IS THE TRUE MADNESS OF THE ARMY EXPOSED! Ten bucks says that was John Milius's invention!

Rating:
Summary: Into the Heart of Darkness
Review: Seen in the theater on Dec. 9th, 2001

I came to Apocalypse Now with no expectations other than some faint knowledge about its subject matter - the Vietnam 'Conflict' - and the merest smattering of its controversial making, in that Coppola supposedly went half-insane during its production. People around me had proclaimed the original cut as genius...but genius, as I have discovered over the years, is really in the eye of the beholder. Thanks to the mass-media machine, mediocrity and flat-out travesties are often trumped up as more than they seem via technical proficiency, big explosions, big-dollar names, and other such glitter-and-fade tactics: pretty on the surface with no soul or synapse challenge beneath.

Not so with Apocalypse Now (redux). Imagine my surprise to discover, halfway through this devastating film, that I was watching a modern interpretation of Joseph Conrad's novella masterpiece Heart of Darkness (Kurtz gave it away... Kurtz, Kurtz, a madman enchanted and in agony...). The journey up the river is slow, tortuous, and full of import, but instead of colonial Africa, Coppola takes us into the madness of war-torn Vietnam. From Kilgore's "surf's up" mania to the simmering resentments at the French Plantation; from the casual butchery of a Vietcong village to the grasping, half-incoherent blips of lust and gratification via opium and Playboy Bunnies (the adult Barbie industry; exploitation made palatable) - Vietnam (and in that, the darkness of the human soul) is seen, captured, exposed through Martin Sheen's murderously world-weary gaze; despite his cynic experience, he is shaken to the core, as are we, the jaded audience.

From a technical standpoint, Apocalypse Now is sheer brilliance. Acting, cinematography, editing, sound, use of color, dialogue, juxtaposition of the light and dark - all contribute to the overall build of tension, one that precisely mirrors Conrad's own literary achievement. Not a moment of 16mm is wasted, no scene overlong or overly-portentous, the flaw of other Vietnam movies (Stone's Platoon in particular). I wonder about what was cut in the original, but ultimately I don't care, nor wish to see the butchered version - redux, in all its harrowing glory, is incredible material, well worth the time invested.

This is not casual entertainment in which to waste brain cells - this is a bleak, visceral force, artistic expression as grave and conflicted as its subject matter. One for the archives.

Rating:
Summary: Great films deserve better than this
Review: This is one of my favorite films of all time. It might have earned more stars had I not seen The original 3 times in 70mm with six track sound when it first came out in 1979. The image and sound were incredible. After seeing it in 35mm, VHS and DVD I was thrilled to read an interview with editor Walter Murch last spring that they were working on restoring the film to best reflect Coppola's original vision. There is no theater near me that has 70mm projection equipment so I had to be content with a 35mm print. For the most part the added scenes work really well, but the color balance for the film, even the original scenes, was all over the place. I thought that when the DVD transfer was done, major discrepancies would be corrected as the transfer would be done from the 70mm original. Boy was I wrong. The color ranges from very good to downright awful. Add to that the trimming of the frame from 2.35:1 to 1.85:1. At least the sound is consistently excellent. I would not hesitate to buy a special edition package that includes the superb "Hearts of Darkness" documentary as long as the film is given its visual due. Put it on a double sided, dual layer DVD with an intermission to lower the compression and put any extra stuff on another disc. Coppola's friend George Lucas could undoubtedly supervise a flagship transfer of this extraordinary movie.

Rating:
Summary: The original was better
Review: The extra footage takes this film to a monter 3hours 20 minutes. Unfortunately while some footage added detail and clarification, a lot of the added material is superfluous garbage. There was a good reason that Coppola cut scenes like the French Plantation in the original film. Unfortunately this new cut has turned one of the greatest films ever made into a dull test of endurance.

Worth watching only if you're an obsessive Apocalypse fan, or a film student (you could probably learn a lot about how bad editing can destroy the whole film from a comparison with the original cut).