Apocalypse Now Redux (R)
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Hauled into a Nha Trang air base in 1969, Captain B.L. Willard (Martin Sheen) is handed a mission improbable: He must boat upriver through the Vietnamese jungle into Cambodia, where he will "terminate" Col. Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a Special Forces commander who has taken the war into his own hands. The fact that Willard's swim to Cambodia defies real-world geography is beside the point: Francis Coppola's 1979 covert operation (extended by 40 or so minutes in the Redux edition) is mainly about himself and us, with the hero's means of transport aptly ensuring that the backdrop of the director's late-Sixties kaleidoscope always spins or drifts by. Through the frame pass the young conscripts who died without a clue (Laurence Fishburne's teenage Clean); the collateral damage of the sexual revolution (the Playboy Playmates); and the counterculture, as embodied by the spaced-out surfer Lance (Sam Bottoms), who adapts so easily to Kurtz's Manson family values. As for Robert Duvall's napalm-sniffing air cavalryman, he's a satiric conception for the ages. And yet, as an epic exploration of evil, Apocalypse Now comes off as deeply glib. Adapted by John Milius from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the script asks the age-old imperial question: How on earth could a good white man go bad among the natives? For answers, Coppola famously turned to his own experience making the movie. But as a result, he pulls away from the criminal realities of a war planned from afar and fought largely from the air. We didn't get "lost in the jungle": We bombed the jungle. (Peter S. Scholtes)
Review by Peter S. Scholtes
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