The late '70s boasted a few notable 'Nam flicks—Paul Schrader's "Taxi
Driver" clone, "Rolling Thunder" (1977), Jeremy Paul Kagan's "Heroes" (1977),
Hal Ashby's "Coming Home" (1978), Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" (1978).
All about the Vet returning home—shell shocked and fucked up.
In 1979, at Cannes, director Francis Ford Coppola said this about "Apocalypse
Now": "My film is not about Vietnam. My film is Vietnam."
Surely the director, when he made that statement, was as mad as his movie
that, in turn, is as mad as its subject matter. Everybody knows about the
insanity of making "Apocalypse Now." But the real craziness came when Coppola
was forced by the studio to cut his film down to size, so to speak, to chop
it up so it would play at a more palatable 153 minutes.
Coppola's original version clocked in at just less than five hours. When he
presented it at Cannes in 1979, he considered it a work in progress though it
was already cut down to around 2 1Ú2 hours for the film festival—but not quite the version we saw when it eventually premiered in November of 1979.
The version I saw in 1979 showed a napalm strike on Kurtz's (Marlon Brando)
compound at the end of the movie. The firestorm was a bookend to Willard's
(Martin Sheen) opaque hallucinations at the beginning of the film while he's
waiting for his mission. In fact, the ending napalm strike solidified a theory I held at the time that the movie was reminiscence—that Willard was, in fact, doomed to
the cyclical hell that was Vietnam. His penance was to relive the horror
over and over for bloodshed he caused as a soldier. Willard, it seemed, was
addicted to the cycle.
When the film was re-released a couple years later, the napalm strike was
gone. My theory became as muddy as Willard's state of mind. But, without the
strike, the film worked as an ambiguous reflection of a sort of triple
insanity at play—Willard's, Kurtz's and Coppola's. Coppola, in a sense,
during the film's earliest stages of release and re-release, became addicted
to fudging around with his Vietnam.
I heard rumors of scenes chopped—the elusive "Plantation Scene" for one—and how the studio had scarred "Apocalypse Now" and that we would never see the "definitive" version.
That is, until now. With the 2001 release of "Apocalypse Now Redux"—a
reworking of the movie that, while still one of the greatest films, becomes
even more maddening with its added 53 minutes. Almost an hour of additional
footage...
What balls...
No doubt, this movie is made for the big screen. I don't care how big your
TV is. I don't care about your million-dollar home surround system.
"Apocalypse Now Redux" should (and deserves) to be seen on the biggest screen
you can find.
The color process remaster is mind boggling—performed with a Technicolor
dye-transfer where color is transferred directly to the film. There are no
digitized color punch-ups anywhere to be found. "Apocalypse Now Redux" proves
that movies should be shot, shown and viewed on film. After seeing how beautifully film can be exploited, it's clear the digital process has a long way to go. The result is so rich, so vibrant and deep, that even if the film
were released without the extra footage, it would be like seeing a totally
new, totally different movie.
But Coppola didn't just stick the extra 53 minutes into the film to simply
pad it out. He and editor Walter Murch re-edited "Apocalypse Now" from the
original raw footage. That said the film's original chronology is
basically untouched. I noticed some scenes that seemed like they were in
different order (I haven't recently seen the original, shorter version on
purpose), which gives "Apocalypse Now Redux" a weird, dreamlike sensation. Coppola and Murch added snippets here and there—pieces of film, dissonant chunks of music
throughout the movie that add subliminal, hallucinatory extensions. It was like revisiting a nightmare but with things longer and not as disjointed.
Four scenes, in particular, were placed into "Apocalypse Now Redux":
- The theft of Kilgore's (Robert Duvall) surfboard
- The trading of fuel for a sexual romp with the downed Playboy Bunnies
- The Plantation Scene
- Kurtz reading a "Time" magazine article to Willard about how the U.S. was
losing the war in Vietnam
Here's a brief breakdown of each additional scene. This breakdown is, by no means, definitive or the final word.
1. The Theft of Kilgore's Surfboard
After surfing, Willard and his crew decide to steal Kilgore's prized surfboard. Here Willard is taken out of
character and Coppola's misstep was playing the scene as slapstick. In a way,
it adds to the madness. But in the original cut, when Willard leaves Kilgore
behind, its jarring and the sharp juxtaposition works in the film's bizarre
locomotion.
2. Fuel for Sex with the Bunnies
After the USO show, the Playboy helicopter
runs out of fuel. As Willard makes his way up river, the crew stops when they
see the chopper. In the pouring rain (Coppola and crew were filming in the
Philippines during typhoon season), Willard makes a deal that he will give
the Bunnies helicopter fuel if his men can have sex with them. Again, the
scene is a total misstep. But, you can see what Coppola was trying to do. The
bunnies were pathetic and sad while the soldiers were looking to either get
off or find solace. The scene, however, misses its own point.
3. The Plantation Scene
It starts shaky with the burial of Clean (Laurence
Fishburn) and segues into a 30-minute diatribe on the absurdity of the Vietnam War. Here, Coppola's soapbox breaks the rhythm of the journey. Yet the
scene is photographed under an opium haze and is rich in burnt oranges and
vivid greens. It doesn't hurt to doze during this scene&3151;in fact, it becomes
a dream within a nightmare.
4. Kurtz Reading to Willard
The worst absurdity in the film. Kurtz, both
benevolent and evil, almost seems like a nice guy here. Kids surround him
while he reads from "Time" as if he's that cool uncle that shows up at parties
and holidays. This simply isn't the same Kurtz who says; "I watched a snail
crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my
nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight...razor...and
surviving."
Admittedly, "Apocalypse Now" didn't need to be "stretched." If the studio
demanded Coppola remove those scenes in the first place, his instincts on
what to cut were right. But, ironically, the additional footage takes nothing
away from the experience. And because the best art is never perfect, the
additional footage only crystallizes "Apocalypse Now Redux" as a masterpiece.
Revisiting "Apocalypse Now" was the cinematic event of the summer. And seeing
it again doesn't necessarily solidify any old theories of the film's
meaning. Instead, it encourages more questions, more ideas.
And, ultimately, "Apocalypse Now Redux" continues to confound as only the
best art will.
Chris Barry numbs his mind as an online editor/writer for a trade publisher outside Chicago. By night he's a film writer—a self professed expert in Cult and Drive-In Cinema who recently got a handful of reviews published in "Shock Cinema" magazine. Visit his site at www.skyhighpictureshow.com.
