XX/XX/25

The End

If you haven’t already seen Apocalypse Now, I encourage you to watch it - by whatever means available. And if you have seen it, you may as well watch it again. For the first-timers, few spoilers will be used moving forward, but I nonetheless implore you to see its theatrical release* hereafter (*not the later cuts).

This is one of those movies that deserves a full day. Structurally, it embodies the slow belligerence it depicts. The psychidelic violence, naive cruelty, and industrialized failure is animated with equal parts clarity and hallucination. Machine gun fire overlaps with rock 'n roll overlaps with screaming overlaps with a chorus of boredom and novelty. And there's still more.

From just a matter of style, the film has a great command over sensory overload. The descent from start to finish is like a collage of everything boiling in post-Tet Offensive Vietnam. A diverse ecosystem of media, chemical and weaponry is on display here, growing out of the material like fungus. Playboy shows, western music, helicopters and gelatin explosives each embody a different invasive species, each settling bizarrely in the jungle. Apocalypse Now presents all these conditions dramatically while still preserving their practical brutality. Both the psychological toll of this war and its mechanical, bodily costs are reflected, the two feeding off one another in traumatic implication. In other words, for its goals, the film would matter less if it cared for niceties. Generally, it doesn't.

There's not many films this long that I feel support such a run-time (hence why I dislike the later versions), but I feel this is one that earns it. There's enough interesting moments to make them feel like they're competing with each other for relevance, while all somehow still being memorable - and relevant. It's a movie that would not function as something else. I mean, you have the hotel scene, the playmate show, Lieutenant Kilgore ("Charlie don't surf!"), Do Lung Bridge (my favorite), and of course, Kurtz' compound. And there's more, there's still more.

I'd talk about the subtext of the movie if everybody else hadn't already done that. They did, in fact. However, for those who want extra credit, go ahead and watch the movie again, this time with a pen and notepad. Write down every time - and specifically in what context - Kurtz and Willard mention "lies" or how they feel about them. As an extra hint, consider what Kurtz means by horror and moral terror being friends, if not enemies to be feared. Lastly, put the words "moral hypocrisy" and "ideological schism" in your head, and focus them towards military bureaucracies and the public (and soldiers). Do some of that analytical thinking on your findings, and after that, you should be good to go!

As one final note, for supplementary materials, of course you have the other big Vietnam War movies: Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. These are also iconic if you haven't seen them; and if you think Full Metal Jacket's second half is kind of a slog compared to the first, you're not alone. But additionally, the book Dispatches by Michael Herr is very tonally similar to Apocalypse Now. This is no coincidence either, as Herr actually wrote all of Willard's narration in Apocalypse Now (as read by Joe Estevez).