Apocalypse Now

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Day 273 of 365 of my year long challenge Week 39: It's so pretty ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Legendary in just about every way imaginable, Apocalypse Now is a cinematic titan. It's the kind of film that will beat down your door and take up residence in that dark corner of your life, rearing its head every now and then for no other reason than it can. Even if it doesn't haunt you, Apocalypse Now is a film that grabs you roughly, shakes you about and plants you in your seat with mouth agape and eyes wide and unblinking. Like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness on which it's based, Apocalypse Now follows Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) as he follows the river north in order to find Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). A military man of prestige, Kurtz was a prized possession until he lost it during the Vietnam war, taking up residence in Cambodia as a demi-god of sorts. Tasked with terminating his command, Willard finds himself descending into the bowels of the Vietnam war and down the same deep, dark rabbit hole that Kurtz himself was lost. Watching Apocalypse Now is very much an experience that has us trapped in the same patrol boat as Willard. From the opening shot to the last, we are tied to this broken man like a bad rash. We follow him into Hell but we don't necessarily come back. Certainly, Willard, Kurtz and all the men lost in those jungles are forever trapped in that Hell of their own making but we have the luxury of turning off the TV and walking away. That is if you can walk away from a movie like this without it following you. As much as Apocalypse Now is filled with familiar faces who seemed to follow Francis Ford Coppola through the seventies, everyone here is perfectly cast and utterly believable. Sheen's broken soldier is a man who has found his way to and from war but never quite recovered. He's eternally haunted by the jungles of Vietnam but is now more at home in them than back with his wife and family. Likewise, Kurtz has made a home for himself as the god-like leader of locals and lost souls. So too are people like Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall). Here, where men can get away with just about anything and answer only to the more insane, life has become a strange thing that terrifies as much as it delights. This is a film carried on the back of countless amazing performances that come one after the other and never stop. Like Virgil guiding Dante through Hell, they each appear more insane and more suited to their own vices along the way. It's a morbid curiosity one must have to write and watch and inhabit such characters and all here seem to have charged headlong into it. Fortunately, we're all as mad as them too. And that's what makes Apocalypse Now so unimaginably fantastic. This is balls to the wall crazy and it has no problem showing us the good, the bad and lots of the ugly. Coppola goes all in to present a twisted carnival in the depths of Vietnam. His camera captures everything in a delirious sweat, twisting, turning and burying itself in the same muck as the soldiers at hand. He creates stunning shots that never seem to stop roaming. In doing so, we really do get lost in this endless string of mania. We get lost in the heat, the boredom, the beauty and the violence. Most of all, Coppola forces us to lose ourselves in a wonderland even more outrageous and unimaginable than the one Alice found. Put all of that aside though and Apocalypse Now is amongst the very best of anti-war films that somehow managed to capture the zeitgeist of not only the war, the sixties and a new age, but also the cynicism of the decades that have followed. There's an ugliness to war now that can only be felt through the screen like this. It's a tangible, palpable, infectious sort of film. Everything about it gets under your skin and feels all too real. Nevertheless, it's so outrageous it's hard to imagine that this isn't all fantasy. Apocalypse Now is a true titan. Performances are as big and loud as the explosions here. The camera is as wandering as it is acutely aware. This is a trip through Hell that all must experience but few can truly grasp. I've lost count how many times I've seen this and I don't know how many times I'll watch this again but Apocalypse Now is a legendary film like few others and one that will hit as hard every single time.