Apocalypse Now (1979) (2001 Redux)
[ID: The poster for Apocalypse Now. It shows a river in Vietnam windings its way through the jungle, the water reflecting the blood-red clouds in the air in front of a huge orange sunset. Silhouetted against the sun are a fleet of helicopters. The sky above is also blood-red. The only text on the poster, in white, is the title. End ID.]
I didn't actually know I was watching the longest possible version of the film until after I'd finished it, but I am somewhat relieved on behalf of the filmgoing audiences of 1979 that they weren't in for the full three hours of this. Much like its basis, The Heart Of Darkness, it's starkly anticolonialist and antiwar, and it's not really subtle about it--and yet from the way I've heard some folk talk about the film, it's still somehow too subtle? It's unfortunate that playing Wagner during the helicopter strike was meant to invoke the Nazis, but unfortunately the cinematography is just too damn good and not undercut by much visible civilian suffering. Like, it's kinda hollowly ironic that Kurtz' breaking point was the Viet Cong cutting off the arms of a bunch of children who'd just been inoculated against polio by American doctors, given that I can't find anything about this really happening but meanwhile the number of American landmines distributed across south asia have been keeping the average number of limbs per child under 3 for the last few decades. Like a lot of the bad shit about Vietnam was actually a lot worse than what's depicted in this film (much like the Belgian crimes in the Congo in THoD), and yet that one gets a lot of emphasis. Also, again like THoD, it's anticolonialist but is still really weird and patronizing about how it depicts the natives, especially the Cambodian tribe that... worships? Kurtz. Do enough of them speak English to get really into his warrior poet shit? Does he have more troops at hand than the ones we see, enough to keep the tribe under his control by force? Has he stumbled into a local prophecy, Road to El Dorado style, that members of the tribe are supporting for local political reasons? Do they just think keeping some stray Americans around will keep them from being bombed? Who knows! They're not people, just scary set dressing. The playboy bunnies get more characterization than the local Vietnamese or indigenous Colombians, and there's a whole scene where the joke is one of them pouring her heart out about feeling like she's not seen as a person while the camera is fixed squarely on her tits and the soldier "listening" to her is in fact having sex with her because their handler bartered their bodies for fuel for their helicopter to get the hell out of there.
Is it good? Look I may be bitching a lot but it is a good film. The cinematography is too good sometimes, but sometimes it's very effective at making the horrors as horrific as they should be, especially in the night scenes and ESPECIALLY especially at Do Long Bridge, a sequence that gives the strongest feeling yet of descending directly into Hell. The daylight scenes tend to be more washed out, colorwise, especially the meandering French plantation sequence that's in an odd sepia tone and kinda seems to be there so random Frenchmen can yell the themes of the film at you (or sexy French widows can seductively whisper the themes of the film at you). Some good acting performances turned in by the whole PBR Street Gang--I did NOT clock at all that Clean was a tiny baby version of Laurence Fishburne until I read the credits after because holy shit, he's an INFANT, which does help underline the pointless horror of the draft. Nobody wants to be there, everything is terrifying and damp, everything sucks and the war seems designed to invent whole new hellholes of PTSD. That's the message of the film and it conveys it pretty damn well.
Is it fun? No. It's the War Is Hell film. There are a couple funny wee moments between the guys, a good line or two--I'm quite partial to "Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500"--but OOFT it's a hard three hours.
Is it queer? No, which feels downright criminal in a film with so many sweaty, shirtless men losing their minds in the jungle. Leonard Matlovich didn't use his headstone to snipe at the US military for this.
