A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2010 Paramount Pictures Apocalypse Now: Full Disclosure Box Set (2010) Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Many film critics and movie lovers consider director Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now to be one of the best war movies ever made. The late Roger Ebert hailed Coppola’s original version as “one of the key films of the century,” while Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers calls the longer 2001 Apocalypse Now Redux “one for the ages when it comes to the moral battles of war.” In Apocalypse Now, Coppola and screenwriter John Milius ( Red Dawn ) take Joseph Conrad’s 1902 Africa-set novella Heart of Darkness and carried it forward in time to the hellish jungles of Southeast Asia.  The filmmakers depict 1960s era helicopter gunships flying into battle accompanied by Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” and change the narrator’s name from Marlow to Capt. Willard.  However, they keep Conrad’s haunting vision of a nig...

Francis Ford Coppola’s original 1979 version of Apocalypse Now is a dark, sardonic, surrealistic yet mesmerizing reworking of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Starring Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Fredric Forrest, Larry Fishbourne, and Dennis Hopper, Apocalypse Now trades Conrad’s African setting for the then-still largely unexplored (by Hollywood, anyway) jungles of Vietnam. The film’s premise is deceptively simple. A hard-bitten, combat-weary Capt. Benjamin Willard (Sheen) is given a difficult (and highly classified) assignment: he is to travel up a long Vietnamese river on a Navy PBR (river patrol boat) to find the jungle outpost of Col. Walter Kurtz (Brando), a highly decorated and intelligent Special Forces officer who has gone "rogue" and utilizing what one senior officer describes as "unsound methods" to fight the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. Willard is to locate Kurtz and "terminate (him) with extreme prejudice....