Apocalypse Now
Category
War
Director
Francis Ford Coppola
Cast
- Martin Sheen
- Marlon Brando
- Robert Duvall
- Frederic Forrest
- Larry Fishburne
- Dennis Hopper
- Harrison Ford
- Albert Hall
- Sam Bottoms
- Aurore Clement
Release Date
15 August 1979
Synopsis
Marlon Brando as Col. Kurtz accurately describes Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 epic Apocalypse Now: "Horror has a face. And you must make a friend of horror." Coppola's war film based on Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, is poetically violent and gloriously chilling. Apocalypse Now, considered to be a movie of great cultural significance, is Coppola's take on the perils of the Vietnam war and the damage it can do to one's humanity, causing moral conundrums and great psychological distress.
The movie starts with no title, no credits, only Martin Sheen as Captain Benjamin Willard, a burned out covert operative, drunk in a Saigon hotel room. He has been given the task to assassinate a certain Colonel Walter Kurtz who has gone mad, leading his own group of natives, charging through the jungles of neutral Cambodia, killing brutally and without reason. Willard joins an odd crew of sorts on a boat journeying on the Nung River. The group then meets an eccentric Lt. Col. William Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall who would utter the famous line "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." later in the film. Kilgore joins Willard and his group on another water ride, and we become witness to a series of dark and provocative scenes. Willard, Kilgore, and the rest do not mind what's going on around them, and are even somewhat desensitized, until Willard comes face to face with the pseudo god/rebel leader, Col. Kurtz, and his philosophies on darkness, the evil that humanity succumbs to, and his own realizations in the midst of war which led to his insanity.
"The horror... the horror," were the last words of a dying Kurtz, but Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is anything but horrible. His movie is memorable not only because of the provocative images it offers, but because of its craftsmanship as a whole. One cannot help but recall the excellent soundtrack for this film, as a combination of rock songs and the operatic Ride of the Valkyries accompanies the movie's more powerful scenes. The literary and contemplative soliloquies of the main characters are insightful, and who can forget the dark humor that is excellently placed throughout the film? "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," comments Robert Duvall's character. A searing, unsettling awe is what Apocalypse Now stirs from its audiences.