While great films are often understood to be extraordinarily good, there are notable exceptions to the rule. Films can gain their greatness by being important, influential, inspiring, or simply by being made at the perfect time, which doesn’t mean they have to be of great quality. Some great films are actually far from perfection. One such film is Apocalypse Now, the 1979 war epic directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
The film is based on a script originally written by John Milius, itself based on Heart of Darkness, a novella by Joseph Conrad about the ivory trade in 19th-century Congo. The general plot, however, is transplanted into 1969 Vietnam and begins in Saigon with Captain Willard (played by Martin Sheen), a war-weary US covert operative who is summoned by his superiors and given a delicate mission deep behind enemy lines. Some time earlier, Special Forces Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) had been sent deep into the jungle to organise Montagnard tribes into a militia and fight the Communist North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong guerrillas. While his campaign proved successful, Kurtz apparently went insane, stopped taking orders, and instead turned his base into a private fiefdom surrounded by thousands of tribesmen who worship him like a deity. Willard is given orders to end this embarrassing situation by simply killing Kurtz. To reach his destination up the Nung River, Willard boards a US Navy river patrol boat commanded by Chief Petty Officer George Phillips (played by Albert Hall) and begins a long and dangerous journey during which Willard and his men witness or take part in spectacular and disturbing acts of violence and destruction. But nothing will prepare them for what awaits them at their destination.
Made at a time when Hollywood, just like the rest of American society, was genuinely trying to come to terms with the aftermath of the Vietnam War fiasco on the national psyche, Apocalypse Now took the widely held view of the war as a catastrophic mistake. While some may attempt to describe the film differently, mostly based on the iconic character of surf-loving Lt. Colonel Kilgore (played by Robert Duvall) and his Air Cavalry making short work of the Viet Cong in spectacular action that mostly looks like fun, the general tone of the film is unmistakably anti-war. The war for the first time exposed the limits of American power, with the world’s most technologically advanced military being defeated by primitive Third World peasants. It also exposed the thin line that separated noble, civilised, and seemingly enlightened American civilisation from the murderous, animalistic savagery that manifested itself in the genocidal slaughter of millions of innocent women and children. This is the line that almost any character in this film crosses in one way or another – Willard, his men, Kilgore, Kurtz, the masses of soldiers that nearly rape the Playboy Bunnies during a USO event, and even the pen-pushing military bureaucrats in Saigon who seek a simple solution to their problem. This view of the Vietnam War as an irrational descent into insanity has managed to frame the general perception of that event to this day. Apocalypse Now, almost immediately hailed as a masterpiece following its Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival, greeted with enthusiastic reviews and with quite an impressive box-office at the time, played a crucial role in that process.
The initial success of Apocalypse Now, however, could be explained less by the quality of the film itself and more by the hype created around its famous New Hollywood director. That hype was further helped by widely publicised problems during production in the Philippines, which included logistical nightmares, sets and props being destroyed by a storm, main actor Martin Sheen almost dying, and rampant alcohol and drug abuse by the cast and crew. Those problems, later shown in the famous 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, make the finished film look even more impressive in context, but they nevertheless don’t justify its major flaws. The cast is superb, with almost everyone giving great performances – Duvall as the perfect embodiment of military machismo brought to absurd levels; Frederic Forrest as an ordinary working-class American thrown into a war he doesn’t understand or care about; Sheen as a professional who successfully hides PTSD trauma within himself; even Harrison Ford makes an interesting cameo as a menacing officer in Saigon. But that doesn’t include Brando, who was obviously miscast for his role. When he finally appears in the last part of the film, Apocalypse Now suddenly loses much of its impact because the audience sees less of Kurtz and more of Brando as the overweight prima donna he was known as in the latter parts of his career. He nearly destroys this film, as he would do many years later with Island of Dr. Moreau, and only in a moment or two does his rambling make sense and allow us to see why Brando earned his reputation as one of the greatest actors of all time. Apocalypse Now, while served well by the excellent cinematography of Vittorio Storaro and production design by Dean Tavoularis, isn’t helped by the rather forgettable music by Coppola and his father Carmine, which can’t compete with the iconic use of “The End” by The Doors at the beginning and end.
Coppola famously said about Apocalypse Now that “it wasn’t a film about Vietnam, it was Vietnam”, and in some ways the film itself could be seen in the same way as the American military misadventure. Despite the large resources involved, it turned out to be a messy project and smashed the myth of the infallibility of its creators. Coppola himself was never completely satisfied with it, and there are at least three major versions released from 1979 until 2018, not counting the Cannes Festival winner, which was actually unfinished. Following this film, Coppola’s career went spectacularly downhill, and one of the most celebrated names in world cinema never repeated his 1970s triumphs. It was also a swan song for New Hollywood; only a year later, the catastrophe of Heaven’s Gate would end the creative freedom and excesses of auteur directors and put major films back under the control of producers and studio executives. But, even without being perfect, Apocalypse Now is a great film that deserves an audience interested in film history and history in general.
RATING: 7/10 (++)
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