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Francis Ford Coppola was king during the 1970s. "The Godfather" (1972), "The Godfather, Part II" (1974), and "The Conversation" (also 1974) all received nominations for Best Picture, and the movies enjoyed much box office success. Therefore, Coppola decided that he could do whatever he wanted, so he went to the Philippines to make a film about the Vietnam War. He did not think that the production would be difficult. After all, using Joseph Conrad´s novella "Heart of Darkness" as inspiration and as a blueprint, Coppola had most of his themes already developed. Also, the Philippines was an American ally, so Coppola figured that he was free to borrow helicopters and other military equipment from the Filipino government at his leisure.
Well, tropical storms often destroyed the sets used for "Apocalypse Now," and Coppola set his production further behind schedule by constantly re-writing the script. He never knew what he really wanted. Harvey Keitel had the lead role for a while, but Coppola ended up firing him. Martin Sheen took over the role of Captain Willard, but he suffered a heart attack so serious that he was given last rites by a priest. Marlon Brando acted like a prima donna, mumbling about this and that rather than actually acting. Everyone was rumored to have been using drugs, including Coppola himself and a then underage Larry (now Laurence) Fishburne. Finally, there was the little trouble of a rebellion going on in the provinces, so the Filipino government would recall its helicopters without much notice to the film crew. Weeks became months, and months became years...and the press began writing headlines such as "Apocalypse When?"
The much-harried Coppola finally assembled a watchable narrative in 1979, and he took it to the Cannes Film Festival. At Cannes, he famously declared that, "This film is not about Vietnam. It IS Vietnam." By this time, Coppola´s perceived arrogance did little to dispel the notion that he had lost his mind in the jungles of the Philippines.
Surprise, surprise, "Apocalypse Now" won the Palme D´Or at Cannes, and it went on to enjoy critical and commercial success. In the decades since its release, the film has come to be regarded as a masterpiece, and Coppola finally explained that he did not mean that his war epic was supposed to be representative of the Vietnam War, just that the torturous process of making the film felt like fighting in Vietnam to him.
In the movie, Army brass assigns Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) the task of going deep into Southeast Asia in order to assassinate one Colonel Walter Kurtz. Once a rising star in the military, Kurtz went AWOL and began leading an army of locals, fighting North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, Viet Cong, Viet Minh, Cambodians, Americans, everybody. Willard hops on a boat manned by four Navy men, and the little group takes a metaphysical journey up a river deep into the heart of...well, darkness. Fear. Anguish. Hell.
Eventually, after losing two of his men, Willard reaches Kurtz´s compound deep in Cambodia. All along the river journey, Willard has been entertaining doubts about war, doubts about America, and doubts about life. Now, he finds himself face to face with someone not unlike himself. Kurtz, like Willard, fought bravely and fanatically for the United States. However, Kurtz could not deal with "the horror" of it all, so he went "mad." Will Willard become "insane," too?
The film is famous for a lot of elements, but just about anyone who watches movies knows about "the scene with the helicopters." Robert Duvall, who plays surfing maniac Colonel Kilgore, leads a squadron of helicopters (the modern day cavalry) on an assault against a Vietnamese village. For a psychological edge, Kilgore blasts Wagner´s "Ride of the Valkyries" on speakers while descending on the technologically-outmatched villagers. At once exhilarating and horrific, the manic-depressive attack sequence is one of the three greatest action set pieces of all time (the other two being the Normandy landing in Steven Spielberg´s "Saving Private Ryan" and the bank robbery in Michael Mann´s "Heat").
Michael Bay´s "Pearl Harbor" serves up a 30-minute assault sequence that was largely created on computers. "Apocalypse Now" shows you real helicopters shooting real live ammo at real targets. To tell you the truth, no matter how "real" computer graphics may look, I have the feeling that audiences will always be able to tell the difference between real reality and generated reality. I also think that audiences will always prefer seeing (and react more strongly to) film events staged with real hardware rather than ghost images generated by software.
More than twenty years after "Apocalypse Now´s" first release, Coppola felt that he was still not done editing the movie. He had cut the film down to around two-and-a-half hours so that it would be commercially viable in theatrical release. However, he was never satisfied with the original edit, so he and editor/sound designer Walter Murch went back to the vaults, dug up footage that they liked, and re-assembled the whole film into what is now known as "Apocalypse Now Redux."
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[release]3294[/release]