APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Francis Ford Coppola
D: Francis Ford Coppola
Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall,
Dennis Hopper, Sam Bottoms, Frederic Forrest,
Larry Fishburne, Harrison Ford, Scott Glenn
Francis Ford Coppola and screenwriter John Milius transplant Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" to Vietnam, dispatching a military assassin named Willard (Martin Sheen) up a danger-infested river to take out a rogue army colonel named Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Probably the best movie ever made about war as hallucination. It starts out with its protagonist cracking up (before he's even assigned to the mission), and gets progressively more insane as it goes along. The deeper into the jungle Willard goes, the more the military command structure and its illusion of social order breaks down, till at last a pure, perfect savagery replaces it. Surprisingly, the actor who redeems the last 30 or 40 minutes isn't Brando, but Dennis Hopper as a brain-fried photographer modeled partly on Sean Flynn. Hopper's drug-fueled ravings are a lot more entertaining (and often more coherent) than Brando's self-indulgent monologues. The 2001 "Redux" edition contains at least two extended sequences that didn't make the cut in 1979: a dinner party at a French plantation that's useful for the context it provides but goes on way too long, and a revealing second encounter with three Playboy centerfolds, first seen dancing at a souped-up USO show, now stranded and reduced to squalor and prostitution in a ruined army outpost, another zoned-out stopover in Coppola's journey through hell. A good companion piece to this is the 1991 documentary "Hearts of Darkness", which chronicles all the moviemaking hell Coppola went through to finish the picture.
Dennis Hopper
(1936-2010)
