Apocalypse Now

“Who’s the commanding officer here?”“Ain’t you??” Cinema’s most hellish, surreally horrifying depiction of American exceptionalism - to my mind, the closest a war movie has ever come to being an actual straight-up horror film, committing fully to the intense disorientation and sense of new mind-melting horrors around every corner, or bend of river. Saw at the Henry Ford Giant Screen. My letterboxd has essentially become an ad for LG with how much I talk favorably about my OLED’s picture compared to theaters, but this was absolutely worth it, not just for the massive screen (has about 10 feet on standard IMAX screens in height and width), but for the sound. Obviously the apocalyptic horror and destruction of the Ride of the Valkyries scene was completely overwhelming, but I’ve always loved the lush ambient dread of the soundscape as they float down that dark river - the constant buzz of the jungle, the almost omnipresent low bass drones, the ghostly guitar/synth lines. Just unreal. And as far as the Kurtz section goes, all I can say is thank god Marlon Brando showed up on that set fat - keeping him in the shadow with only his face and hands visible gives him such an eerie, mythical presence. When you get down to it, Kurtz is really no worse than the men who sent Willard on the mission, or Kilgore, or indeed Willard himself. He just has the gall to be direct about it, and we can’t have that, not when we’re trying to recruit an endless line of kids to die for a diffuse, indecipherable cause with a patina of operatic bravado and rock music and sexual teases. Only his method is different. “You have a right to kill me. But you have no right to judge me.” My favorite war movie, and one of my ten or twenty favorite movies period.