Apocalypse Now
Never have I watched a film as dense, engulfing, and rich as Apocalypse Now Final Cut. The horror. You begin on this comical journey down the river, stealing surfboards, smoking blunts and watching shows, but the humanity devolves as the fight for nothing corrupts the crew and the world at large.
A topical, emotional study of violence, war, and nature, executed with metaphorical intrigue and plot-driven, emotional storytelling, captured in sweeping, personal, and atmospheric ways. He kills a part of himself when Colin is murdered, the tortured, mentally ill soldier we see at the beginning of the film. This is not just a war film that deconstructs our humanity and sanity, but a greater character-driven journey into the purpose of Apocalypse Now.
The decision to not blow up the jungle cult led by a deranged, traumatized man is a great change from the exodus of violence we experience in the film before. A classic, horrifying war-boat road trip, turned into a battle against himself, this is a post-colonial, war-ridden masterpiece of cinema.
From the intimate performances, saddening, deadly consequences, and excerpts from different characters that extenuate the Vietnam War and its ignorant purpose, a great story unfolds. For those reasons, I have to give this a 5. We are both animals and gods; I have not been that intrigued by a film in a long time. Emotional, political, artistic, but real. Cinema.
I think the comedic nature juxtaposed by the constant surrounding war and death, and the way it accelerates into tribal philosophical degeneration was perfect. The death of Clean is the peak of this emotional effect—a seventeen-year-old whose drumming shoe taps and youth are shut down immediately as he is gunned down the way he did the locals on that boat. The French interlude at the plantation, where actual discourse is started around the war rather than killing anything that moved. We see coping mechanisms all around, from the wild surfer distracting the lieutenant to the small cult Kurtz builds—an amalgamation of guilt, introspection, and near-death/war spiraling—after those he tried helping with injections had their arms chopped off to deny help from America. Visual, literary, personal horror. Helicopters over fire, men lie over death, fire over jungle—just film school in a movie.
With the animal cruelty controversy, I think they didn't go hard enough; if we're animals, the murder scene should have been more first-person and bloody. Also, as someone who watched the extended cut for my first viewing, I really appreciated the plantation scene and political context; a film covering a war this real and complex deserves recognition to fully serve the heavy minutiae of war. Follow a paranoid journey into the jungle psyche of America. Avatar if it was good.