Apocalypse Now (1979)

One of the best films i have seen

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness was about venturing into the moral depths of colonial Africa. Though it wasn't an immediate sensation, it evidently was not ignored by the literary community. The famous line announcing the antagonist's demise, "Mistah Kurtz-he dead," served as an epigraph to T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men." Eighty years after Conrad's book debuted, the Coppola film Apocalypse Now hit the big screen. Though lightly influenced by Heart of Darkness, the movie's setting was not the Belgian Congo, but the Vietnam War. And though the antagonist (played by Marlon Brando) was named Kurtz, that particular Kurtz was no ivory trader, but a U.S. military officer who had become mentally unhinged. The book began and ended in the United Kingdom. Though it recounted Marlow's voyage through Belgian Congo in search of Kurtz and is forever linked to the African continent, Conrad's novella began and ended in England. At the story's conclusion, the "tranquil waterway" that "seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness" was none other than the River Thames. The well-traveled protagonist, Marlow-who appears in other Conrad works, such as Lord Jim-was based on his equally well-traveled creator. In 1890, 32-year-old Conrad sailed the Congo River while serving as second-in-command on a Belgian trading company steamboat. As a career seaman, Conrad explored not only the African continent but also ventured to places ranging from Australia to India to South America. Colonizing was then, when the book appeared,all the rage . Imperialism-now viewed as misguided, oppressive, and ruthless-was much in vogue when Conrad hit shelves. The "Scramble for Africa" had seen European powers stake their claims on the majority of the continent. Britain's Queen Victoria was portrayed as the colonies' "great white mother." Since the wise magi saw the star in the East, Christianity had found no nobler expression. Conrad, however, did not echo the imperialistic exuberance. He no champion of colonialism, Chinua Achebe-the Nigerian author -delivered a 1975 lecture called "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" that described Conrad as a "thoroughgoing racist" and his ubiquitous classic novella as "an offensive and deplorable book." However, even Achebe credited Conrad for having "condemned the evil of imperial exploitation." And others have recognized Heart of Darkness as an indictment of the unfairness and barbarity of the colonial system. Heart of Darkness managed to ascend to immense prominence in the 1950s, after the planet had witnessed "the horror"-Kurtz's last words in the book-of WWII and the ramifications of influential men who so thoroughly indulged their basest instincts. Coppola's film was based on a terrible misreading of Conrad. Coppola turned a brilliant piece of fiction into a visual disaster. The complex narrative was transformed in ordinary Kitsch. The final scenes, involving Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando , are lame. What, then, can one see in "Apocalypse Now"? Little more than all the one-sided anti-American, anti-Vietnam-war stereotypes of those times: Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries subtly suggesting that America might be a counterpart to National Socialism); the denunciation of the "Ugly American" alienation; the irony & smartness of metaphors like juxtaposing warfare and surfer-safaris ; and so on. Hardly "the most honest account of the futility of war." A better description is "a schizophrenic approach to the randomness of guerrilla warfare." An ambiguous fantasy. But people are welcome to read into it any way they want.

During the Vietnam War, Captain Willard is sent on a dangerous mission into Cambodia to assassinate a renegade Colonel who has set himself up as a god among a local tribe. Apocalypse Now is for sure a really beautiful film and very well made in general plus Robert Duvall gives one of his best perfomances and the entire cast is pretty good in general but where the film kinda disappointed me at least the Redux version did was with the story that was kinda slow and at times even hard to follow, some of the character's motivations were also a bit muddled like Brandon's for instance plus the scenes with the 2 women and the french weren't even needed. Overall an overrated and decent drama. (7/10)

I know many would say that this movie is not really just about Colonel Kurtz. It is actually about the journey, about what how the war really impacted people, about the terror-the despair-the victims-the soldiers-the guilt-the sacrifice-the executions and so on. To many it is sublime, to some it's Coppola's best work even. No grievance against that in my case.Also, the movie did show a very different kind of valor. We all were on our toes for finding out the terrifying Colonel. How intriguing he would be! He would not go without a ferocious fight- that was expected. Coppola literally just flouted at us there. No objections here either. An excellent venture on his side. I am pretty sure I would have enjoyed the cheekiness here , only the timing was off- 2 hours 33 minutes off to be exact. To sum it up - don't watch if you are not able to stomach cheekiness after devoting yourself to something for that long, otherwise it is a pretty awesome movie.

There is no denying. Apocalypse Now is one of the finest, most disturbing, unsettling yet unreleningly gripping and beautiful films of all time.