APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX (2001)  ***1/2

Reviewed 8/18/01

By now, APOCALYPSE NOW has its firmly divided camps, those who insist it is a masterpiece and those who insist it is a mess.  It is actually some of both.  Whatever you think of it, there is really nothing else in movies quite like Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”  It is a movie of superlatives.  In terms of sheer brazen ambition and risk, it ranks up there with, if not surpassing, the likes of INTOLERANCE, FITZCARRALDO, and LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF.  APOCALYPSE NOW has some of the most memorable of film images – the opening scene of dreamlike helicopters whiffing by in slow motion superimposed upon a restless Martin Sheen staring up at a ceiling fan, the U.S.O. Playboy bunnies performance, Willard’s boat panting its way down the river passing underneath the tail of a crashed plane, the nightmarish Do Lung Bridge as the “asshole of the world,” Marlon Brando’s flittering fingers as he dribbles water onto his bald pate, and of course the “Flight of the Valkyries” helicopter attack sequence, perhaps the most beautifully shot and perfectly edited action scene in film history.

APOCALYPSE NOW also has an occasionally shudder-inducing final 45-minutes.  All that leads up to it has spent so much time building up Kurtz that it would have been impossible for the character to fulfill those expectations.  Coppola is reduced to floundering in ambiguity.  Brando is practically nonsensical in his mumblings, but far worse is Dennis Hopper.  At least Brando has presence, but Hopper just engages in annoying drivel.  While both characters have the excuse of insanity, clearly Coppola was after much more.  Nevertheless, the ending is sustained, like the rest of the film, by Vittorio Storaro’s astonishing camera work.  (In this film, he transforms lens flare into a new art form.)  If the end’s content is superficial, its imagery still carries the weight of a descent into hell.

The most significant element of APOCALYPSE NOW, film technique not withstanding, is its critique of an egocentric, crass, self-indulgent American mentality.  This is achieved by contrasting it with the Vietnamese, who constantly linger on the fringes of the movie.  Coppola never tries to pretend he understands their culture, and in fact, gets some of it wrong as in the native-to-the-Philippines Ifugao caribou sacrifice.  They are irrevocably other, and in this way, are neither condescended to nor patronized.  What they do is enlarge the context through which we view American behavior.  The Vietnamese school children led away as the American helicopter attack begins undermines the fascist revelry of military power on display, which the Wagner music underscores.  The Vietnamese hanging off the fence and watching the dancing Playboy bunnies reveal both the extravagant allure and the foreignness of this exercise in exploitation.  The Vietnamese boat capsized by Lance’s water-skiing to “Satisfaction” acts as a metaphor for American blindness to disruption and destruction literally and figuratively.  Finally, Lance’s camouflage face paint is compared to the body paint of the tribesmen at the Kurtz compound.  This connotes similarity in a specific peculiarity, giving us a glimmer of understanding how something so foreign may not be so much as we thought, or that we are just as foreign in our own way.

APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX includes about 45-minutes of additional footage.  The newly added scenes are interesting as curios, but APOCALYPSE NOW is better without them.  While not dreadful, they add to the feeling of bloatedness in a movie already criticized for that very aspect.  They would make a fascinating addition to the “Deleted Scenes” section of a DVD, but they were wisely cut the first time around.

The second encounter with the Playboy bunnies is the worst addition.  In this scene, Willard and crew exchange fuel for sex.  It goes on tediously adding little to the movie except time, pretension, and nudity.  It ends on a funny note though as Laurence Fishburn peers through a window at a bunny who asks, “Who are you?”  He replies, “I’m next, maam.”  The opening to the French Plantation sequence is amazing as a fog rolls back to reveal armed Frenchmen, but it’s all downhill from there.  As a mini-history lesson and indictment of American naiveté, it feels forced.  Also, the new scene of Marlon Brando reading “Time” magazine trades more languorousness for a beautiful shot of Vietnamese children peering through sunlit holes at Willard, who is imprisoned in the dark

What APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX is good for is another opportunity to see the encased original film on the big screen.  No matter how outlandishly gigantic your television set is, it will still not be the same as watching this in a theater.