Comprehensive information and links about Apocalypse Now

Apocalypse Now . Set during the Vietnam War, the film tells the story of a taciturn American soldier who is sent to "terminate with extreme prejudice" the command of a rogue United States Army Special Forces colonel. The narrative of his journey and its culmination are studded with events which, while bizarre, are based on real Vietnam stories. The soldier's journey becomes increasingly nonlinear and hallucinatory. Coppola's agenda clearly involves larger themes; the film's subtext concerns a journey into the darkness of the human psyche.

The film features performances by Martin Sheen as Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Marlow in Conrad's novel), Marlon Brando as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, Dennis Hopper as a fast-talking hallucinogen-using photojournalist, and Robert Duvall in an Oscar-nominated turn as the borderline-psychotic Lt. Colonel Kilgore. Several other actors who were (or later became) prominent stars had minor or supporting roles in the movie including Harrison Ford, R. Lee Ermey and Laurence Fishburne (who, only fourteen years old when shooting began in March 1976, was credited as 'Larry Fishburne').

The movie poster art for is one of the more famous paintings by Bob Peak, who is considered an influential artist in the world of film when it comes to movie posters.

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Background

Filmed in the Philippines (most notably the Pagsanjan River and Hidden Valley Springs), the film went far over budget and schedule: a typhoon destroyed many of the sets, the Philippine Air Force helicopters used for shooting were constantly called back by President Ferdinand Marcos to be used in actual combat, the lead role was recast (Martin Sheen replaced Harvey Keitel after shooting had begun), Sheen then had a near-fatal heart attack, Brando was intractable and out of shape, and Coppola himself was mentally fragile. Being similar in appearance and remarkably similar in voice, Martin Sheen's brother Joe Estevez stood in for the unwell Sheen in much of the film and some of the narration is by him.

After the first edit, the film was six hours long and had to be severely edited; the original released version was just over two and a half hours long. (Coppola re-released the film in 2001 under the title , restoring footage and sequences and lifting the running time to 200 minutes.) For background information on the film, see Eleanor Coppola's documentary,

U.S. Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard is stationed in Saigon; a seasoned veteran, he is deeply troubled and apparently no longer fit for civilian life. A group of intelligence officers approach him with a special mission up-river into the remote Cambodian jungle to find Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, a former member of the United States Army Special Forces.

They state that Kurtz, once considered a model officer and future general, has apparently gone insane and is commanding a legion of his own Montagnard troops deep in neutral Cambodia. Their claims are supported by very disturbing radio broadcasts andor recordings made by Kurtz himself. Willard is asked to undertake a mission to find Kurtz and dispose of him "with extreme prejudice."

Willard studies the intelligence files during the boat ride to the river entrance and learns that Kurtz, isolated in his compound, has assumed the role of a warlord and is worshipped by the natives and his own loyal men. Another officer, sent earlier to kill Kurtz, has apparently become one of his lieutenants.

Willard will begin his trip up the Nung river on a PBR (Patrol Boat, River), with an eclectic crew composed of by-the-book and formal Chief Phillips, a black Navy boat commander; GM3 Lance B. Johnson, a tanned all-American California surfer; GM3 Tyrone, AKA "Clean", a black 17-year-old from The Bronx; and the Cajun Engineman, Jay "Chef" Hicks.

The PBR arrives at a Landing Zone where Willard and the crew meet up with Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore, the merciless commander of the AirCav in the region, following a massive and hectic mopping-up operation of a conquered enemy town. Kilgore, a keen surfer, befriends Johnson. Later, he learns from one of his men that the beach down the coast which marks the opening to the river is perfect for surfing, a factor which persuades him to capture it. The problem is, his troops say, it's "Charlie's point" and heavily fortified. Dismissing this complaint with the explanation that "Charlie don't surf!", Kilgore orders his men to saddle up in the morning so that the AirCav can capture the town and the beach. Riding high above the coast in a fleet of Hueys accompanied by H-6s, Kilgore launches an attack on the beach. The scene, famous for its use of Richard Wagner's epic "Ride of the Valkyries", ends with the soldiers surfing the barely claimed beach amidst skirmishes between infantry and VC. After helicopters swoop over the village and demolish all visible signs of resistance, a giant napalm strike in the nearby jungle dramatically marks the climax of the battle. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning; smells like...victory," Kilgore exults to Willard. The quote made it to #12 onto the American Film Institute's AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes, a list of top movie quotes.

The lighting and mood darken as the boat navigates upstream and Willard's silent obsession with Kurtz deepens. Episodes on the journey include a run-in with a tiger while Willard and Chef search for mango fruits, an impromptu inspection of a Vietnamese sampan that leads to massacre, a surreal stop at the last American outpost during a Vietnamese attack against a wood bridge under construction there, and the shocking deaths of both "Clean" and Chief Phillips during a gunfire ambush with hidden Viet Cong soldiers and a spear thrown by a native on the shore, respectively.

Once arrived at Kurtz's compound, Willard leaves Chef behind with orders to call in an air strike on the village if he does not return. They are met by a borderline-psychotic freelance photographer (Hopper) who explains Kurtz's greatness and philosophic skills to provoke his people into following him. Brought before Kurtz and held in captivity in a darkened temple, Willard’s constitution appears to weaken as Kurtz lectures him on his theories of war, humanity, and civilization. Kurtz explains his motives and philisophy in a famous and haunting monolgue:

I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget.And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment..

While bound outside in the pouring rain, Willard is approached by Kurtz, who places the severed head of Chef in his lap. Coppola makes little explicit, but we come to believe that Willard and Kurtz develop an understanding nonetheless; Kurtz wishes to die at Willard's hands, and Willard, having subsequently granted Kurtz his wish, is offered the chance to succeed him in his warlord-demigod role. Juxtaposed with a ceremonial slaughtering of a water buffalo, Willard enters Kurtz's chamber during one of his message recordings, and kills him with a machete (This entire sequence is set to The End by The Doors). Lying bloody and dying on the ground, Kurtz whispers "The horror...the horror." (This line is taken directly from Conrad's novella.) Willard walks through the now-silent crowd of natives until he comes upon Lance, who seems to have integrated himself into the society. The two of them make their way to the PBR and float away as Kurtz's final words echo in the wind as the screen fades to black.

, which restored 49 minutes of scenes that were cut from the original film, including stopovers at a French rubber plantation wherein Mr. Clean is buried and a rain-soaked American base camp. Nudity absent from the original was also included in the Redux, most notably at the French plantation and in an additional scene with the Playboy playmates (from the USO show.)

In this version, Willard steals Kilgore's surfboard, which can still be seen briefly onboard the PBR in the original cut.

Alternate Endings

Coppola denied having any actual alternative endings. In the DVD commentary, he states that they simply had a massive amount of footage to edit with and thus had some choices to make. They did consider using the explosion footage made during their destruction of the Kurtz compound, but he later decided that implying that the air strike had been called in was contrary to his wish to offer some slight hope that we could overcome the horrors of war.

However, there are multiple slightly varying versions of the ending credits.

One version, from the 70mm release, ends with no credits, and shows the boat pulling away. Another version, for the 35mm wide release, rolls the credits while the Kurtz compound is destroyed in what must be assumed was an air strike. Yet another version ends silently, without the explosions, and the credits roll over a black background.

, i.e. an odyssey into the darkness of humanity.

Willard's constant narration gives us a glimpse into his fractured psychological state particularly in the opening scenes where he lies in his bed and stares blankly into the ceiling. He relates that he is on his second tour of duty and that he returned because he was unable to re-integrate himself into civilian life.

dlSaigon... shit; I'm still only in Saigon... Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said "yes" to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I'm here a week now... waiting for a mission... getting softer; every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around, the walls moved in a little tighter.

This chilling monologue besides suggesting how man is connected to war is also an allusion to post traumatic stress disorder, a condition common to many Vietnam veterans. Willard's quest for Kurtz's compound parallels Kurtz's own descent into madness. He never tells his fellow shipmates of the PBR the true purpose of the mission and in a chilling scene, after his crew massacres people sailing on a sampan, Willard murders the surviving girl. Kurtz who was a committed family man and a highly respected colonel is driven insane after witnessing a vile incident commited by his enemies while on a peacekeeping mission. He realised that he can never win the war unless he surrenders his morality and kill without judgment. For Kurtz, this action drove him insane and so he gathered other disillusioned soldiers and started a strange, bizarre civilization in the Cambodian forest.

This is a subtle allusion to the bureaucracy that directs soldiers in the war. The bureaucrats propagandized the Vietnam War as a just cause to save the world from the evil of Communism.

The general public and several Vietnam war veterans fiercely condemned the war and believed that the government and lied and misled the public.

Even Willard who is assigned the mission is cynical about his mission from the beginning:

The climax at Kurtz's compound is the most confusing and the most frequently debated aspect of the film. Several critics believe it to be anticlimactic after the earlier more action oriented scenes and also the fact that it differs greatly from other war films in that there's no final battle scenario.

Ebert in his original review defends the ending:

dlCoppola doesn't have an ending, if we or he expected the closing scenes to pull everything together and make sense of it. No should have been surprised. Apocalypse Now" doesn't tell any kind of a conventional story, doesn't have a thought-out message for us about Vietnam, has no answers, and thus needs no ending.The way the film ends now, with Brando's fuzzy, brooding monologues and the final violence, feels much more satisfactory than any conventional ending possibly could.

When Willard arrives, he is captured and put into containment as he is 'interrogated' by Kurtz who lectures and drones on about his philosophies. While other interpretations exist, it can be assumed that Kurtz wishes to die a soldier's death and has been waiting for his death. But his followers refuse to kill him and Colby(Scott Glenn) who was sent to kill him ended up joining his 'tribe'. He wishes or rather hopes that Willard would be able to do so. Willard, at first does not want to as he too is converted by Kurtz's beliefs but after Kurtz's monologue and his statement on judgment, Willard understands Kurtz's desire and so decides to complete his mission by subverting his moral judgment and justifies it to himself

dl wanted me to do it, him most of all. I felt like he was up there, waiting for me to take the pain away. He just wanted to go out like a soldier, standing up, not like some poor, wasted, rag-assed renegade. Even the jungle wanted him dead, and that's who he really took his orders from anyway.

The 'jungle' is seen as a metaphor to nature or more specifically man's human nature. After killing Kurtz, Willard is revered by the denizens of Kurtz's tribe but he instead leaves suggesting that perhaps he is capable of escaping the horror of war.

premiered in 1979 to mixed reviews and received polarized responses from the audiences. It is said that it was as lauded as it was reviled. Many critics slammed the film, calling it overly pretentious, while others felt that it ended anticlimatically after a splendid first act.

Roger Ebert, who hailed it as the best film of 1979 and added it to his list of Great Movies stated:

dl"Apocalypse Now is the best Vietnam film, one of the greatest of all films, because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul. It is not about war so much as about how war reveals truths we would be happy never to discover."

Today, the film is regarded by many as a masterpiece of the New Hollywood era. It is on the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies list at number 28. Kilgore's quote "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" was number 12 on the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes list. was named number 1.

The catastrophic production of the film unfortunately made it symbol of the dangers of excessive directorial control over a film. The production was said to have taken a toll on Coppola, both mentally and emotionally. To many cinephiles, is the last great film of a legendary director whose subsequent films have failed to match it in quality.

, the film deviates extensively from it. The novel takes place in the Belgian Congo in the 19th century; Kurtz and Marlow (who is named Willard in the movie) are commercial agents of a Belgian ivory company that brutally exploits its African native workers. In the novel, Marlow is sent to bring Kurtz home; and Kurtz dies of a heart attack. In the movie, Willard is sent to kill Kurtz.

The character of Kilgore is an invention of the screenwriters. Nevertheless, Coppola has maintained many episodes (the spear and arrow attack on the boat, for example) that respect the spirit of the novel and in particular its critique of the concept of civilization and progress. The fact that Coppola substituted European colonization with American interventionism does not change the universal message of the book. [1]

Influence

As one of the most iconic films of the 20th century, the film has been referenced and parodied countless times.

, about health inspector Will Dullard, who makes a trip to inspect the meat processing shop of a man named Mertz.) dubs the scene that the photojournalist talks to Cap. Willard (when he is in the wood cage), as the film is played on a TV. starring Sheen's son Charlie Sheen parodies the film. Willard's character and Charlie Sheen's character are depicted staring at each other while passing in opposite directions on PBRs on a river. As they meet each shouts in unison, "I loved you in Wall Street!". in a theater inside the base, singing along and interacting with the infamous helicopter attack scene, much in the way one would at a , Elaine Benes visits her employer, J. Peterman, in a scene that parodies Willard's eventual meeting with Kurtz. with Bart assuming the role of Kurtz. Marge Simpson also tells her husband, Homer, in another episode, . The 'Ride of the Valkyries' helicopter sequence was humorously homaged in a "Treehouse of Horror" short..") The short is set in Saskatchewan, with Rudolph in the Willard role and Santa Claus in the Kurtz role. Rudolph's mission is to "terminate the Kringle (Santa) with extreme prejudice." This short would air on the Christmas edition of , Warner Brothers sends Yakko, Wakko and Dot Warner on a mission to stop a crazed movie director (a parody of Jerry Lewis) from filming a movie the studio had cancelled. The trio find the director, who has created a kingdom for himself in which stunt doubles worship him. They stop the film and smash him with a 50 ton weight. His last words are "The hurting... the hurting..." Throughout the episode, a singer who looks very much like Jim Morrison drones "This is the ending, the ending of our story, the ending." episode features a flashback scene where "the Cigarette Smoking Man" is tasked with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The scene has many things similar or identical to the Scene where Willard is tasked with the assassination of Kurtz, most prominently both have a question that goes something like "have you ever met myself this man or the general before?" to which Willard and the CSM both reply "Not personally". has an episode that parodies the opening scene, as well as a helicopter pilot stating "I love the smell of lip balm in the morning" (1995Apocalypse Now is very closely based on the film. Most lyrics are very close to being a direct quote from the movie.The Canadian band Death From Above 1979 take their name from the 'Death From Above' motto on Kilgore's helicopter.The band Dismember uses the quote "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!" to start of their song "Let the Napalm Rain."The band Sodom uses the full quote, including "smells like... victory" in their song "Napalm in the Morning".The band Ministry uses a sample of Dennis Hopper saying "Alright, it's alright" on their song "N.W.O."The band The Clash's song "Charlie Don't Surf" from their album Sandinista! derives its title and concept from the movie., a series of quests in the Stranglethorn Vale zone take you to the camp of a crazed Colonel Kurzen who has brainwashed his men, in an attempt to kill the Colonel.In a homage to the infamous village attack scene, the computer game "Battlefield Vietnam" offers up "Ride of the Valkyries" as a song to be played while inside helicopters and other vehicles.The Half-Life singleplayer mod 'Heart of Evil' is partly inspired by the film (the Vietnam War setting, a U.S. Army captain sent to assassinate a rogue colonel, the helicopter ride with "Ride of the Valkyries" in the background, the boat ride to the colonel's compound).In StarCraft, one of the Firebat's quotes is "I love the smell of napalm." The Firebats are flamethrower wielding infantry.Before the members of the SAS patrol leave England in the book Bravo Two Zero by Andy McNab, they watch

In 2000 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

It is widely believed that Apocalypse did not win the Best Picture Oscar in 1979 due to the fact that another Vietname epic, "The Deer Hunter," had just won the previous year. It is often regarded as a far superior film to the 1979 winner of the award, Jaffe's "Kramer vs. Kramer".

Academy Award for Best Art Direction - Set Decoration (Angelo P. Graham, George R. Nelson and Dean Tavoularis)Academy Award for Film Editing (Lisa Fruchtman, Gerald B. Greenberg, Richard Marks and Walter Murch)"You smell that? Do you smell that? ... Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink . The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like ... victory. Someday this war's gonna end." - Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore"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." - Col. Walter E. Kurtz (on tape)"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write 'fuck' on their airplanes because ... it's obscene!" - Col. Walter E. Kurtz"They were gonna make me a major for this, and I wasn't even in their fuckin' army anymore." - Captain Willard"Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500" - Willard, when beginning his assigned mission"What are they going to say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans?" - The photojournalist to Willard, on how Kurtz will be remembered