From the Shelf: Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)
Acquired: A long, long time ago (probably mid-2000).
Seen before?: Twice, both times from this DVD, Last viewing likely late in 2003.
For my money, the greatest war film I’ve ever seen. There’s the famous Truffaut quote about a truly anti-war film being impossible to make because cinema makes war seem exciting; if we accept this as a truism, I submit that Coppola’s extraordinary, expansive rendition of the Vietnam War should be considered the rare truly anti-war film, because it makes war seem exhausting, paranoid and terrifying, and it does so better than any film I can think of that isn’t named Come and See. Most of the military grunts we see are twitchy, frightened young men who do whatever they can to distract themselves from the fact of the war, and the few truly competent soldiers we see are all completely insane, ranging from the outward barking mania of surf-obsessed Colonel Kilgore to the mind-blown, hollow-eyed fellow at the Do Long bridge who is uncannily accurate with a grenade launcher. At the center of it all is the grim Captain Willard, who exists only as a man of war, and the enigmatic Colonel Kurtz, whose clarity of vision regarding his purpose and function in the war machine have left him both the sanest and most psychotic man in the film. The overarching idea here is not of war as a cause of psychosis but as an incarnation of it - madness is endemic to the soldier because what they’re participating in is madness, and you can only simmer in that shit for so long before it rubs off on you. Apocalypse Now is a hugely harrowing vision of Hell from a great filmmaker who would never again work at this level - but then, most filmmakers never even get to this level.
Up next: Ghosts and perverts…
