Touches of Greatness
Of course, all the bravura elements — including Robert Duvall’s hyper-macho performance, some stunning aerial photography, and a series of dazzling jungle sunsets and sunrises — remain intact from the original film. The Oscar-winning camera work by Vittorio Storaro keeps you guessing, in fact, throughout most of the film’s painfully overlong-running time (now well over three hours), whether “Apocalypse” will end up as a great film, with glaring flaws and touches of madness, or a mad, flawed disaster, with touches of greatness.
Only with the embarrassing appearance of mumblin’ Marlon Brando does the movie finally answer the question: yup, it’s still a bomb, and still one of the most frustrating cinematic experiences of all time. Since the entire film builds up to the epic confrontation with Brando’s character (Colonel Kurtz), his on-screen inadequacy literally ruins the picture. His bald noggin shines through shadows like the harvest moon, and his appearance inspires mirth, shock, pity and revulsion, but never the awe and horror the script demands.
Despite its self-conscious (and repeated) citations of T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad, the movie feels less literary, and more littered — with meaningless illusions. Ultimately, the Eliot lines that come to mind to summarize this empty, overstuffed, ill-considered enterprise, declare:
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”
Disregard Establisment Critics
Rather than watch this re-edited ordeal, anyone interested in the project should view the fascinating and startlingly intimate 1991 documentary about the making of “Apocalypse Now.” It’s called “Hearts of Darkness,” it’s available on video, and it tells an unforgettable story of Hollywood arrogance, madness and overreaching.
As for this film (Rated R, of course, for violence, gross, graphic sex scenes, and plenty of harsh language), it truly deserves only TWO STARS. Please disregard the establishment critics who feel some peculiar need to over-praise this re-release, as if wanting to make up for its previous failure and recapture some element of lost, stoned youth.
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(Michael Medved hosts a nationally syndicated daily radio talk show that focuses on the intersection of pop culture and politics. You can contact him at www.michaelmedved.com.)
Drug-Induced Haze
The two major added scenes — involving a sexual interlude inside a downed helicopter with Playboy playmates, and another maddeningly ambiguous sexual interlude with the wife of a French planter — add absolutely nothing to the film, except some additional evocative (and incoherent) images, to go along with the mountain of such visions already provided. The plantation sequence in particular actually hurts the movie — slowing the already waning, wheezing forward momentum of the story, while adding jarring elements of theatre of the absurd.
What, exactly, is the point of this lengthy dinner party scene at an elegant colonial outpost in the middle of the Vietnam War? Is Francis Ford Coppola so desperate to prove that even in the midst of the drug-induced haze in which he made this movie, he still remembered that the French had been colonists in Vietnam before the Americans?
