Movie Review: Apocalypse Now Redux

FILM REVIEW: APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX

By Michael Wilmington

Chicago Tribune Movie Critic

4 stars

Critics should be wary of superlatives. But how can you talk about "Apocalypse Now Redux," Francis Ford Coppola's monumental re-edit of his 1979 Vietnam War epic, without seeming excessive? Magnificent to look at, thrilling, ingenious, spellbinding and superbly done on every level, this is not just one of the best films of the year or the decade, but of all time.

From now on, when we speak of "Apocalypse Now" and this three-hour, 17-minute cut by Coppola and editor Walter Murch should be regarded as the definitive version of the project we should put it where it belongs, alongside "Citizen Kane," "Seven Samurai," "The Rules of the Game" and a select few others, including Coppola's "Godfather" series. This is filmmaking of overpowering beauty, daring and brilliance, a movie that can stand beside any in American film history.

"Apocalypse Now Redux," with 47 minutes of footage added and expert re-editing throughout, restores Coppola's work to its rightful place and Coppola to his. This vast saga sometimes damned in 1979 as pretentious and self-indulgent now, in its complete form, seems a model of artistic control over a seemingly chaotic and daunting subject: the bloody, absurd and tragic war in Vietnam.

With awesomely sensuous images, memorable characters and masterly action sequences that are laced with humor and horror, Coppola gives us not the real war but a rock 'n' roll war-movie odyssey, a mix of truth and nightmare. In this hallucinatory collage, we get the Vietnam War filtered though American culture and also as it might be perceived by soldiers on edge, weary, drugged, lost in the jungle and in a multimedia hell.

The film's strange, tumultuous variety now seems one of its great qualities: the way Coppola, screenwriter John Milius and their company take the central event a search mission in Vietnam patterned after the short Joseph Conrad novel "Heart of Darkness" and weave together so many diverse cultural strands, from Conrad and Mark Twain to The Doors, from Playboy to "The Golden Bough," from John Ford's "The Searchers" to Richard Wagner's "Ring" cycle.

"Redux" means "returned," as from battle or exile. And as we return on the dangerous journey of Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) and a multiracial four-man gunboat crew upriver through Vietnam to the Cambodian jungle empire of mad Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), this new cut deepens the experience in every way.

Where once the film seemed at times to sacrifice atmosphere to action and emotion to violence, now everything is in a finer balance within a richer, more deeply human framework.

Where once some characters seemed thinly drawn like Frederic Forrest's manic Chef, Sam Bottoms' surfer prince Lance B. Johnson and Albert Hall's stoic Chief and some others seemed to be dropped too soon like Robert Duvall's great, blustering surfer-warrior Lt. Col. Kilgore ("I love the smell of napalm in the morning!") now they all live and breathe with added depth and complexity. We see more anguish in Chef, more slow deterioration in Lance, more fury in Chief and more boyish menace in then-15-year-old Laurence Fishburne's Clean. A hilarious coda has been added for Kilgore: Right after his breathtaking "Ride of the Valkyries" helicopter assault on the Vietnamese village, he has his surfboard stolen by Willard's crew and pursues them vainly upriver with loudspeaker entreaties.

Where before the film's politics and philosophy seemed vague and evasive trapped somewhere between the left-wing, anti-war Coppola and the right-wing, gung-ho Milius now the cards are laid clearly on the table. We get a deeper critique of the war and its origins and a more eloquent assault on its waste and depravities, especially in the added long, dreamlike scene toward the end, set on a French colonial plantation that incongruously appears in the midst of the carnage and river mists, and where patriarch Hubert deMarais (Christian Marquand) hosts a banquet for Willard, reciting an embittered chronicle of colonial futility.

Scenes like this provide a context the '79 "Apocalypse" lacked. Ultimately, it helps that two viewpoints converge within this film: that a large part of writer Milius loves war and the warrior's code, and a large part of co-writer/director Coppola distrusts or fears them. That mix of exhilaration and revulsion gives "Apocalypse Now Redux" a charged quality shared by "Platoon," "Lawrence of Arabia" and only a few other battle epics. What we see at the end is not just the death of one man and the ascension of another, and not just a battle between peoples, but the ravaging of a national soul, the ultimate casualty of war.

Through it all, "Apocalypse Now Redux" doesn't seem longer than the previous 2 1/2-hour version, but swifter, more engrossing, less marred by strange gaps and jumps. Now we know what happened to the body of Clean, why Lance dons war paint, what Kilgore did after they left him and what happened to the trio of "Suzy Q"-stepping Playmates after they soared off in their helicopter from the riotous USO show. Even the role of troublesome, legendary star Brando is deepened. In a restored scene he sarcastically reads a lie-riddled Time magazine account of the war. And the brain-blown photojournalist played by Dennis Hopper modeled, some say, on Errol Flynn's war correspondent son, Sean seems more at home in this world than ever.

Shot by master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro in iridescent shafts of light, "Apocalypse Now" was always one of the most beautifully photographed of all war films. Now the beauty pierces more deeply. "Apocalypse Now Redux" is tender as well as violent, a lamentation as much as a nightmare. And where before the film's ending seemed oddly mystical and tentative, perhaps even a touch desperate, now it seems a more logical climax because we see and understand more of what came before. The still-exciting action sequences are balanced by more poetic or thoughtful ones, and everything builds more surely to a muted, somber last chord that comes like a song resonating from the depths of the Earth, beating with the darkness of a human heart.

There may be a tendency to blame Coppola for the long wait to see this film whole, as there was in '79 to trash him for his hubris in making it at all. But many great films are the products of similar hubris from "Intolerance" to "2001." What really determined the fate of "Apocalypse Now" was the closing down of a lost golden age of adventurous filmmaking in the late '60s and the '70s. Coppola, in cutting his epic to 2 1/2 hours, was following the laws of the system, and it now seems ironic foreshadowing that one of the grim-faced officers who sends Willard on his mission to "terminate (Kurtz) with extreme prejudice" is the young, pre-"Star Wars" Harrison Ford, playing Col. ("George") Lucas.

But this movie has always been incomplete, as we can now see. Coming back decades later to it, Coppola has been able to reshape these extraordinary scenes with a wisdom and humility perhaps missing before. A brilliant young man shot the movie; now, a brilliant older man, cooler of judgment, reassembles it. Perhaps that fused perspective is what the 1979 "Apocalypse" most needed. I have seen that release many times. But though I gave it a rave review when it opened, I doubt that I will ever watch it again. Its time has gone.

Movies can thrill us like few other art forms because they can so totally absorb our attention that they blot out the real world and replace it with another and few alternative cinematic worlds have ever been as audaciously conceived and as wondrously executed as the one in "Apocalypse Now Redux."

"Apocalypse Now Redux"

Directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola; written by John Milius and Coppola; narration by Michael Herr; photographed by Vittorio Storaro; edited by Richard Marks; sound design by Walter Murch; production designed by Dean Tavoularis; music by Carmine and Coppola. A Miramax Films release; opens Friday, Aug. 10. Running time: 3:17. MPAA rating: R (disturbing violent images, language, sexual content and some drug use).

Col. Kurtz Marlon Brando

Lt. Col. Kilgore Robert Duvall

Capt. Willard Martin Sheen

Photojournalist Dennis Hopper

Chef Frederic Forrest

Clean Laurence Fishburne

Chief Albert Hall

Col. Lucas Harrison Ford

Hubert deMarais Christian Marquand

Roxanne Aurore Clement