![]() His voice in narration is gruff yet high-toned, aged way beyond its years - as if the fire and smoke of war live in his throat. This isn’t a man who’s on the way down - this is a man who’s already at the bottom. Sheen gives such a bruised performance that it can be upsetting to behold. The visual language draws us inwards to Willard, constantly trying to understand and see him. At times it’s a shallow focus, while others its darkness. The images are crisp and stunning, but often something keeps us separated from them. The humid sun that smothers him in the early scenes will later be lost to shadows, a striking visual charting Willard’s descent into hell. We’re scared of his violence but desperate to get at that dimly-fading inner light. Weathered but youthful, Willard is studied by Coppola’s camera like a washed-up movie star. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro patiently explores Willard’s face with the depth of a painter. Some scenes appear as tableaus, so still and measured are they, while others have a carefully controlled dynamism that blows the stillness to smithereens. Despite its undeniable haze of 1970s intensity, the film feels contemporary in its craft. On a filmmaking level, it’s simply unimpeachable. Regardless of the conjecture over which cut of the film is most essential, or valid jokes about Coppola’s self-importance, Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut is worth another trip. So here we find Coppola, heading back down the rivers of time into the heart of darkness for perhaps one last journey. They’re drawn to it not because it’s all they know, but because it’s such an altering force that it obfuscates everything else. ![]() Coppola positions filmmaking as if it is its own war self-inflicted, hubristic and, in this case, annihilating. Here are men-fictional and real-paralysed by war and the recreation of war. His inebriation was genuine, as were his tears and blood. The moment was real Martin Sheen was plied with alcohol as the cameras rolled. And here is Willard, similarly self-destructive, shattering a mirror with his fist in a drunken stupor, obsessed with the patterns of blood on his hand. So hellish was the film’s year-long shoot that Coppola contemplated suicide on several occasions. Both men are called by a destructive obsession with a past that they know nearly killed them. It’s worth considering how far removed Coppola is from Willard. His doing so gives the film a mercurial allure, as if each time you see it, it will have mutated into something else: a war film, a psychological odyssey, or a poisoned fairytale. A perfectionist, the director routinely repositions the iconography of the film as if it were a living work of art. But now, 18 years later, we have Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut, which trims several Redux scenes and upscales the film to crisp 4K.Īrguments over which version of the film is definitive are endless and answerless, forever stoked by Coppola’s revisits. In addition to the original 1979 cut of the film, Apocalypse Now: Redux appeared in 2001 containing 49-minutes of extra footage, creating what appeared to be Coppola’s final version. Director Francis Ford Coppola has asked us to do this before. ![]() To experience, or re-experience these icons today is almost a contextualising exercise, like taking objects and finding a place and function for each of them within a room. If the familiarity is not from their relation to the story then surely it is from their placement as cultural icons, existing seemingly separately to the film itself. Almost everyone will be familiar with some element of the film, be it “The Ride of the Valkyries” helicopter sequence, “… the smell of napalm in the morning”, or the image of Willard rising slowly from the river and its fog. With this new final cut of Apocalypse Now, so do we. In his room, with only bottles of alcohol and his own beaten reflection to keep him company, Willard relives it all. Scenes from Willard’s past are not past, they’re living, current and engulfing. The fire that envelops the palm trees is silent. ![]() A piece of haunted music joins the churn: the gentle, sinister opening chords of The Doors’ “ The End “. If air is chopped up and redistributed by these blades… then so is time, sent swirling through Captain Benjamin Willard’s (Martin Sheen) mind. The pulse of sound, cutting through the silence, sounds more like the alien hum of a spaceship than the blades of a helicopter. A US Army officer serving in Vietnam is tasked with assassinating a renegade Special Forces Colonel who sees himself as a God. ![]()
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