CS Weekly Archive > DVD of the Day > 08/11/06

Heart of Cinematic Darkness

by jason davis

Famously described by its director as the Vietnam War rather than a film about the conflict, Apocalypse Now's evolution from war movie to meditation on man's place in the world is nearly as compelling as the film itself, which transcends its screenplay and loose literary inspiration to explore what it means to be human.

Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier

John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola (latter also directed)
Narration by Michael Herr

Army Airborne Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) is assigned by Saigon military intelligence to travel up the Nung River into Cambodia and assassinate renegade Special Forces Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has established himself as a god among the native villagers. En route, the crew of PBR Streetgang encounter surfing-obsessed -- and likely insane -- Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore's (Robert Duval) cavalry, a trio of Playboy playmates (Colleen Camp, Cynthia Wood, Linda Carpenter), and forgotten family of French rubber farmers before their strange journey ends at Kurtz's camp. The plot is simple. The execution of that plot (both within the story and without) is a decidedly more complicated matter. Ostensibly a film about the Vietnam War, the movie is more concerned with the philosophy behind the war than with the physical violence of the conflict. The film is, in effect, a history of white colonial exploitation, a criticism of moral relativism, and an exploration of societal evolution wrapped in camouflage and ammunition belts.

John Milius based his original screenplay on Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. That script was due to be directed by George Lucas under the auspices of Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope studio. When Lucas was sidetracked by creating the most lucrative franchise in media history, Coppola took on the project, rewriting Milius' script and starting the strange evolution that would take Apocalypse Now from war film to philosophical meditation, a journey that would punctuate itself with a typhoon destroying the film's sets, a heart attack for star Martin Sheen, and a nervous breakdown for Coppola. As the trauma of production escalated, Coppola having staked his financial security on the project, it deviated further and further from the screenplay, with Coppola relying on a heavily annotated copy of Heart of Darkness and allowing happenstance and improvisation to augment the story at regular intervals. Presented on the DVD are both 1979's 153-minute theatrical cut 2001's 202-minute Redux (Coppola's director's cut).

In its initial incarnation, Apocalypse Now was abridged to curb Coppola's psychedelic excess and create a more commercially viable war film. That movie is a work of art capturing the confusion and suffering in Vietnam like a scrapbook of misery. Apocalypse Now Redux delves deeper into the experience, submerging the viewer into a disparate world where the ideology of U.S. politics, French colonialism, and the threat of Communist expansion fades away to reveal the underlying experience of humanity coming to grips with itself. Captain Willard's journey upriver, in the company of his Navy cohorts, is repeatedly referred to as "a journey back in time" by Coppola. The boat's crew encounters societal devolution as each group they meet exhibits less civilized behavior than the last. Mirroring this within their group, Willard's unit slowly discovers the savagery within themselves as they grow nearer to their physical objective and further from the intellectual auspices that birthed the mission.

The movie wallows in its context: Willard's mission seems straightforward at the story's outset, but becomes increasingly absurd as his journey reveals the hypocrisy of the assignment. The army wants Kurtz dead because he has too deeply committed to the war they've created. Kurtz is the avatar of American involvement in Vietnam -- whether he's lost his way or found the only truth depends on the audience's perspective. In Saigon, he seems like a madman, but in person, he's a poet who has found himself adrift in a sea of hypocrisy. As Kurtz muses, why is it okay for soldiers to firebomb civilians, but not to spray-paint obscene language on their weapons? The movie meditates on these questions of perspective and finds that the only answer rests with the lies that redefine human existence in terms that authority considers acceptable.

As is explained throughout the supplementary material, the narration that offers insight into Willard's state of mind was added in post-production. Contributed by writer Michael Herr (who penned the book Dispatches, compiling letters sent home from Vietnam) the narration imposes an after-the-fact structure on the film's story, crystallizing the deterioration of Capt. Willard's mind as he journeys upriver. Key to these voiceover addendums is the examination of the Kurtz dossier that reveals the megalomaniacal Colonel's character slowly throughout the film such that his eventual appearance is presaged by a complex image of the man in the viewer's mind. Proving the notion that a film is written three times (in pre-production, principal photography, and post-production -- and perhaps a fourth time here, in Apocalypse Now Redux), this presentation of Coppola's epic elegantly captures the evolution of a story that seeks to explore the human condition amidst the darkest pages of its history.

- Commentary by co-writer-producer-director Francis Coppola
- "The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot read by Marlon Brando
- 13 deleted scenes
- A/V club featurettes
  - The Birth of 5.1 Sound
  - Ghost Helicopter Flyover
  - "The Synthesizer Soundtrack" by Bob Moog
  - Technical FAQ
- The Post-production of Apocalypse Now
  - A Million Feet of Film: The Editing of Apocalypse Now
  - The Music of Apocalypse Now
  - Heard Any Good Movies Lately? The Sound Design of Apocalypse Now
  - The Final Mix
- Apocalypse Then and Now
- PBR Streetgang
- The Color Palette of Apocalypse Now
- Redux Marker

Coppola's engaging commentary recounts the film's creation in exacting detail while chronicling the evolution of the script and its eventual abandonment in favor of Conrad's book. A convenient marker feature allows viewers to easily identify material added for the 2001 Redux version of the film and a selection of deleted scenes shore up the characterization of some supporting players. The rest of the supplemental matter serves as an informative technical overview of the film's production. Though technical matters are not usually the purview of CS Weekly's DVD reviews, the sheer quality of these extras, and their intrinsic relevance to Coppola's realization of the movie makes them profoundly educational. Sadly, Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper's 1992 Emmy Award-winning documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, chronicling the film's creation, is absent.

More an experience than a movie, Apocalypse Now illustrates the diverse forces that shape a film narrative through the various phases of production. The Complete Dossier's extravagant presentation of both versions of the film alongside copious extras documenting its development deserves a commendation of excellence above and beyond the call of duty.

Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier
Paramount Home Video
Rated R; 202 min.

Buy it now

Jason Davis is the DVD Manager for CS Weekly, a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and writes "TV Wasteland" for Cinescape.com. He lives and writes in Burbank.

Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier courtesy Paramount Home Video

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