Apocalypse Now

by Erik McClanahan

The DVD package of the special edition version of Apocalypse Now is reason enough for purchasing this war film classic. The package also features both the original 1979 theatrical version of the film and the longer, more bloated 2001 Redux cut.

Any serious DVD collector worth his or her salt will drool over the simple, but beautiful, package design, with its light brown color made up to look like a dossier folder given to soldiers concerning a mission. The right side of the package folds over and closes with a blood red seal that reads: OFFICIAL - United States Army, giving the package a truly authentic feel of a soldier’s mission file. To make the look of the package even better and more authentic, the words CONFIDENTIAL are printed on the bottom left corner of the cover.

Once I opened this magnificent package to see what was inside the double-disc special edition, my eyes were immediately drawn to the image of Marlon Brando’s character Col. Walter Kurtz. It is a realistic hand-drawn picture from the scene where Kurtz is expressing his feelings about the Vietnam War to Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) and pouring water over his head. This image is not only wonderfully recreated in the inside of the DVD package, but it also serves to highlight one of the many perfect scenes in a film filled with numerous perfect scenes.

Take the opening of the film. Perhaps the best beginning to any film, Coppola lets us know exactly what’s in store for the audience in the next two-and-a-half hours (or the next three plus hours if you watch the Redux version). It’s as if Coppola wanted to say: you are about to embark on the most drug-induced, psychedelic, horrifying and beautiful journey in war film history.

Coppola says all of that by opening on a jungle. We hear the sounds of helicopters echoing in the distance. One helicopter passes the camera. The sound of The Doors’ “The End” begins to play. The song couldn’t be have fit better in any other movie than this one. Its psychedelic guitar and keyboard opening is followed by Jim Morrison’s low howl chanting “this is the end . . . beautiful friend . . . This is the end, my only friend, the end.” The end of what? The film is called Apocalypse Now, so this Doors classic fits well with the hell our protagonist is about to go through in the story.

Then the jungle erupts in flames as we witness the fury and pure destructive force of napalm. The camera pans to the right as we see an image of Capt. Willard’s face superimposed over the jungle image. Followed by a beautiful cutaway in which the sound of helicopters is matched to the image of a spinning ceiling fan in Willard’s room as he imagines all the horror he has witnessed in Vietnam. This is the mother of all film montages, with a fantastic rock song accompanying the overlapping images, and Coppola (along with co-editor Walter Murch) puts it in the first four minutes of the film. Anyone who isn’t hooked in the beginning of this film should have their pulse checked for signs of lifelessness. This is filmmaking at its most pure and driven. The details of the production of Apocalypse Now have been mulled over by film historians and critics ever since its original release. Coppola never made another great film after it, but that’s forgivable because the man gave us The Godfather, The Conversation, and Godfather part 2 in his filmmaking prime in the 70’s.

Other fantastic scenes from the film include the unbelievable battle scene in which Robert Duvall’s Lieutenant Col. Kilgore leads a helicopter attack on a beach (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning . . . It smells like victory.”). The collection of images in this sequence were so far ahead of their time that few battle scenes have been able to match its sheer power and awe (the only thing I can think of would be the first half-hour of Saving Private Ryan). In an age where cinema’s battles are typically being constructed by computers, this sequence shows us everything for real. The psychedelic bridge scene later in the film is another highlight of sound, music and image joined to give the audience a true visceral, hallucinatory experience.

The DVD is stocked full of wonderful extras and goodies for film geeks such as myself. Two separate commentaries (one for each version of the film) done by Coppola are fascinating as the auteur recounts the hellish experience of making the film. Numerous other featurettes go into the film’s revolutionary sound design, the synthesized score, deleted scenes and other making-of specials.

For a film experience unlike no other, seek out this fantastic special edition DVD. Coppola’s overall goal was to make a rock n’ roll war film, and he accomplished this indeed. The film plays out with an orchestral plotline that has high notes and low notes much like a symphony linked with wonderful images. Legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro deservedly won the Oscar for his fusion of light, shadows, scale and composition that gives beauty to a film that is ugly in so many places.

Apocalypse Now is a must own for any DVD nut, and it needs to be seen by a new generation of filmgoers who are sick of CGI-created battle scenes.