Because they really don't make them like this any more. I can only say it's time to grow back into it again. Apocalypse Now is supposed to be a film you grow out of. What passion this film has - what mad daring, what ambition. That's a line to match Duvall's napalm-in-the-morning haiku. "How do they smell to you, soldier?" he asks his prisoner, Martin Sheen. And Brando has an outstanding new scene, reading aloud an article about the war from Time magazine claiming that things "smell better" now. It is a restoration that goes a long way to correct the movie's political naivety, though it exposes the limitations of Martin Sheen's blank tough-guy performance, and it's topped off with an embarrassingly softcore Bilitis-style "erotic" moment.Ĭoppola also brings back the Playboy bunnies for a tragicomic sex scene in their helicopter - contrived, but certainly watchable. Coppola brings back a fascinating, if verbose, scene in a French plantation, in which the old French masters try to explain to the Americans how bitter their white man's burden of empire has felt. (photography) Film Editing by Lisa Fruchtman Gerald B. (as Francis Coppola) Writing Credits Cast (in credits order) verified as complete Produced by Music by Cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. And the new footage beefs up the later stretches. Apocalypse Now (1979) Full Cast & Crew See agents for this cast & crew on IMDbPro Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Did we explain that distinction to gung-ho screenwriter John Milius?īut what an incredibly exhilarating, dazzling, exciting film it still is. Incredible to think how solemnly we, the liberal dinner party classes, all agreed that Apocalypse Now was the "good" film about Vietnam as opposed to, say, John Wayne's The Green Berets. (So that's what Colonel Kurtz has been doing - revising for his mock English A-levels.)Īnd all the objections still hold true: in its utter unconcern with the Indo-Chinese, Apocalypse Now licensed a slew of movies which suggested that the real victims of Vietnam were photogenic n-n-n-nineteen-year-old American soldiers: the "bad trip" theory of imperialism. The literary references are still there, still skin-pricklingly irritating and dumb especially Marlon Brando reading Frazer's Golden Bough and Jessie L Weston's From Ritual to Romance in his lair. T he impossible has been achieved: Apocalypse Now has been made more self-indulgent! Francis Ford Coppola's extended new version of his 1979 magnum opus amplifies everything brilliant about it, and everything exasperating.
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