Apocalypse Now (1979)
Speaking in retrospect about his 1979 film, director Francis
Ford Coppola once said, "Apocalypse Now is not about
Vietnam, it is Vietnam."
Coppola was referring to the immense difficulty and hardship he
experienced in making the film, but his words are true in another
sense as well. Apocalypse Now is not an accurate film - it
does not depict any actual events that took place during the long
history of American involvement in the Vietnam War.
It is,
however, a true film - it clearly conveys the surreal, absurd, and
brutal aspects of the war that were experienced by many who took
part in it.
The broad outline of the script is adapted from Joseph Conrad's
bleak 1902 novella Heart of Darkness, which concerns
nineteenth-century European imperialism in Africa. Screenwriter
John Milius transplants the latter two-thirds of Conrad's tale to
Southeast Asia, and gives us the story of Captain Benjamin L Willard (Martin
Sheen), United States Army assassin, and his final assignment in
Vietnam.
"I wanted a mission," Willard says in voice-over
narration, "and, for my sins, they gave me one. When it was
over, I'd never want another."
Willard's mission is to journey up the Nung River into
Cambodia, and there find and kill Colonel Walter E Kurtz, a renegade
Green Beret officer who has organised a force of Montagnard
tribesmen into his own private army, which Kurtz has been using to
wage war in his own way, on his own terms.
Kurtz's methods of fighting the Viet Cong are unremittingly
savage - according to the General who briefs Willard on his
mission: "He's out there operating without any decent
restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human
conduct."
And so Willard begins his own journey into the heart of
darkness, courtesy of a Navy patrol boat and its crew: Chief
Phillips (Albert Hall); Clean (Larry Fishburne); Chef (Frederic
Forrest); and Lance (Joseph Bottoms). Along the way, Willard and
the sailors encounter people and situations that highlight the
absurdity of the American approach to the war.
This idea is brought in early when Willard remarks after
accepting the mission to find and kill Kurtz: "Charging
people with murder in this place was like handing out speeding
tickets at the Indy 500."
 The absurdity escalates when Willard meets Colonel Kilgore
(Robert Duvall), who commands the Airmobile unit that is supposed
to escort Willard's boat to the mouth of the Nung River.
Kilgore
is bored at the prospect, until he learns that the section of
coast where he is supposed to deliver Willard offers excellent
currents for surfing.
At dawn the next day, Kilgore's helicopters assault the Viet
Cong village that overlooks their objective, wiping out the
inhabitants so that Kilgore and his troops can surf - and,
incidentally, allowing Willard to continue his mission.
The famous sequence where the helicopters attack the village while
playing Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries through loudspeakers
is perhaps the best fifteen or twenty minutes ever committed to
film. And the
aftermath of the air strike that Kilgore calls in to finish off
the village allows Duvall to deliver one of the film's more famous
lines: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning! It smells
like . . . victory!"
Later, in a remote American outpost where the boat stops for
supplies, Willard and the crew arrive just in time to see a gaudy
United Service Organisations (USO) show, replete with a band and
go-go dancing Playboy Playmates.
 This highlights another theme in the film - the Americans do
not like the jungle, so they attempt to turn the jungle into
America. In Willard's words: "They tried to make it just like
home." And that, the film seems to say, is why they would
lose - you cannot win a jungle war by trying to make the jungle
into America.
As the boat departs the outpost and its go-go dancers,
Willard's thoughts turn to the enemy: "Charlie didn't get
much USO. He was either dug in too deep or moving too fast. His
idea of good R&R [rest and relaxation] was a handful of cold
rice, or a little rat meat."
Willard's parting thought on the
spectacle he has just witnessed is: "The war was being run by
clowns, who were going to end up giving the whole circus
away."
That quotation evokes another of the film's themes: the
distinction between "clowns" and "warriors."
Most of the United States military people whom Willard encounters
can be considered clowns.
They commit massive, mindless violence, which is inefficient as
well as counterproductive to the stated goal of "winning the
hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people."
A warrior, on the
other hand, uses violence only when it is necessary, and then does
so surgically. His response is precise, controlled, and lethal.
The scene greeting Willard when he arrives at Kurtz's
stronghold is like something out of a nightmare. The bodies of
dead Viet Cong are everywhere. A crashed airplane hangs half out
of a tree. A pile of human skulls leers from the shore. The
Montagnard warriors, their faces painted white, stand silent and
ominous as ghosts as they watch Willard's boat pull in.
And then there is Kurtz himself (Marlon Brando). His ragtag
troops clearly consider him a mystic warrior.
 Willard thinks Kurtz
may be insane - but, if so, it is a form of insanity perfectly
suited to the kind of war he is fighting.
As Willard notes while
reading Kurtz's dossier on the trip upriver, "The Viet Cong
knew his name now, and they were scared of him."
Willard is frightened of Kurtz, too. But his fear does not stop
him, several nights later, from sneaking into Kurtz's quarters and
hacking him to death with a machete. Willard is able to do this
because, he says, Kurtz wished to die: "He wanted someone to
take the pain away."
The filming of Apocalypse Now was in itself a
remarkable undertaking: Endless problems - including a typhoon
that destroyed most of the sets, difficulties with the authorities
of the Philippines (where the film was shot) and personal problems
with the actors and the crew - brought the costs sky high and the
shooting process from the scheduled six weeks up to 16 months.
Initially Harvey Keitel played Captain Willard. They filmed for
six weeks before Coppola instituted the cast change. Eight months
into production Martin Sheen had a near fatal heart attack.
Coppola himself at the end was almost physically, financially and
psychologically devastated.
When Coppola approached the Pentagon for US military assistance
in the production of Apocalypse Now he received a reply
stating "The Army does not lend officers to the CIA to
execute or murder other Army officers, and even if we did, we
wouldn't help you make a picture about it".
The documentary Hearts of Darkness (made by Coppola's
wife about the making of the film) is a vital companion piece to
the original film.
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