The brilliant framework of the plot of "Apocalypse Now" is the story "Hearts of Darkness", by Joseph Conrad. The theme of the story is the struggle between good and evil and the idea that there exists both in every man's soul. It is a man's journey down a river gradually leading him further and further into the heart of darkness. Francis Ford Coppola uses the setting of Vietnam to tell this story and it's a perfect platform to describe the experience of this war. A great movie is a great story told in a great way. "Apocalypse Now", really unlike any other movie that I know of goes beyond this. In the way that the story is told we get Captain Willard's story but within this story we get Coppola's vision of not only the Vietnam war but war in general. Beyond this we get a vision of the dark side of man's soul. Coppola is trying to juggle a ridiculous amount of ideas and themes in this movie. It's why he almost went insane making it and even threatened to kill himself along the process. He accomplishes this juggling act through the framework of telling the story, through the decision to use poetic voice-over throughout, through spectacular imagery, and some amazing performances.
We first meet Captain Willard in his Saigon hotel room awaiting a special ops mission. The movie continues to be entrancing as we watch a drunken anguished Willard weeping convulsively by his bedside as "The End" continues to play. This is a man who has been forever changed by this war and he's about to get a real choice mission, and in Willard's words "When it was over I would never want another."
His mission is to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a man that was being groomed to be at the highest levels of the military but who had apparently gone mad. In his briefing he listens to a recent recording of Kurtz's.
"I watched a snail crawling on the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. It's my nightmare. Crawling along the edge of a straight razor and surviving."
He also hears him say "We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Cow after cow. Village after village- Army after army. They call me an assassin. What do you call an assassin who accuses an assassin?"
The highest levels of the military believe that they've got a madman running lose in the jungles of Vietnam and want him terminated with extreme prejudice, and Willard is the man to do it.
Willard's journey to Kurtz will take him down a river in a navy patrol boat. If the war were a storm, Willard would be heading right into its eye, in effect heading straight into the heart of darkness itself. As Willard gets closer to Kurtz its as if he's getting closer to the soul of war.
"I was going to the worst place in the world and I didn't even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of miles away up a river that snaked through the war like a main circuit cable plugged straight into Kurtz."
The further down the river he travels, the more dangerous things become and the purer the sense of war and warrior. The movie as a whole becomes more intense and continues to be filled with a greater depth. The Vietnam war shows itself along the way with its many faces and at the end is the realization that this man who is considered to be insane is the sanest thing along the ride.
The river journey is symbolic of the experience of the Vietnam War. There are scenes mixed with horrors, randomness, and the surreal, and the deeper down the river Willard goes the deeper into the experience of the war. We also learn more about Colonel Kurtz and his descent into madness as Willard reads the classified special ops report on him through voice over along the way. His story is part of the journey. Normally I don't like voice-over in movies and there is quite a bit of it in "Apocalypse Now." It works for three reasons. One, it allows some of the quieter segments of this long river ride to have more depth to them by telling the story of Kurtz without pulling us out of this immersive journey through other means such as flashback. Two, this movie is so poetic in the way that it's being told that some amazing passages of voice-over just add to that overall feeling. Three, Martin Sheen's voice is perfect for this task. It has a combination of strength and reverence, and also the quality of someone who has been through the shit and is about to meet some more.
Along for the ride are three soldiers and the boat's chief. There's Lance Johnson, a famous surfer back home and free spirit who is frequently seen tripping on acid. A very young Laurence Fishburne plays a seventeen year old afro-american soldier named Tyrone, Frederic Forrest plays a tightly wound soldier named Chef who is a saucier back home in New Orleans, and then there is Chief Phillips the boat's skipper. We get to know and really care about each of these characters and they won't all make it through this journey. This journey down the river is their experience of Vietnam as well.
The first experience in this journey is to meet up with the Air Cavalry Unit that will assist Willard and his men to the mouth of the river that they will be traveling down. When they first meet up with this Unit it is total, random, surreal chaos. It is post battle and there are dead bodies scattered across the earth. Half the village is on fire. An amphibious vehicle with the face of a shark and sharp metallic teeth is riding onto shore. A television director, played by Coppola is telling Willard to not look at the camera, to act natural and keep moving. I love that little moment. It's so ludicrous. There are other journalists scattered around taking pictures. The captain of this squad is scattering death cards on the dead bodies of the Vietcan. A priest is performing last rights, a tank is spitting fire, and a cow is being airlifted out of the village. It's insane and pretty much describes a microcosm of Vietnam. The leader of the Air Cavalry Unit is Captain Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall in an oscar nominated performance. This is one of my favorite characters of all time. He's the American cowboy of the Vietnam war with a Helicopter instead of a horse. He is the antithesis of Kurtz which is perfect because he's the one who will escort them to the river which will lead them closer and closer to Kurtz and further and further away from himself. Kilgore is an untouchable, unstoppable force who rains down destruction upon his enemy. He is charismatic, walks with a strut and a swagger, and demands and holds the attention of everyone around him. He's also a man who loves his men, who wants them to be happy and feel home away from home. He is a man of war and distraction handing out death cards upon the Vietcan and later playing guitar by a fire while he and his men eat steaks. Kilgore is a lover of surfing and tells Lance, a famous surfer who he's thrilled to meet, that they like to finish up operations early so they can get some good surfing in. He like most of his men have one foot in and one foot out of the war. In voiceover Willard says "The more they tried to make it like home the more they made them miss it."
There are two areas of the river that Kilgore can escort them to and he picks the most dangerous one because there is good surfing. What ensues is an iconic visually stunning scene.
The choppers liftoff into the air one by one as a soldier plays a bugle. Badmothafuckinass!!! There are then multiple shots of all the helicopters in the air, like giant ominous insect demons, black against a dawn sky. Kilgore turns to Lance and says "We're coming low out of the rising sun and about a mile out we'll put on the music." Badass poetry. There is a great image of a helicopter with a missile on one side and a surfboard on the other perfectly symbolizing Kilgore. Then comes one of the most memorable moments in film. They slowly approach the village and you can hear Wagner's "The ride of the Valkyries" loudly coming from a helicopter speaker to scare the shit out of the villagers. You see the perspective of the villagers as they begin to hear the music and see helicopters in the distance. They're running for shelter, terrified. You see Vietnamese soldiers running to get into position with guns, rockets, and mortars. As this music is playing the helicopters begin to blow the shit out of this little village. You then see a chopper blown up, other choppers land and you see soldiers scurrying, terrified across the earth. A soldier refusing to leave a chopper is screaming "I'm not going, i'm not going." before another soldier pulls him out. Another soldier is screaming in pain from a leg wound. Rockets are flying through the air, the beasts of the air are flying back and forth raining down destruction; villagers are running for their lives; a woman sabotages a chopper full of wounded with a grenade, and all the while dramatic Wagner plays adding to the insanity of it all. Kilgore decides it's now safe to surf as mortars explode all around him. The surfing is hairy so he orders an air strike of napalm all along the tree line of the river. Now its safe to surf. Fucking insane.
The boat begins its descent into hell and it all begins with the random and surreal. Chef and Willard get attacked by a tiger on a quick sojourn for Chef to relieve himself. This is the perfect scene to reflect that anything can happen at any time. They come upon a random U.S.O. Playboy Bunny show at a base along the river when trying to get fuel and ammo, and on a routine check of a Vietnamese boat they get paranoid and scared and unintentionally slaughter the entire family on the boat because they mistook a puppy for a gun. Quick, random, surreal, and terrifying events.
As they get close to their destination they reach a hell on earth at an army outpost. One of the soldiers calls it "The asshole of the world." Soldiers are jumping into the water and trying to find anyway out of there, begging the patrol boat to get them out of there. Lance has dropped his last tab of acid and this is the perfect example of a bad trip. It's a psychadelic hell realm. A bridge is lit up like a christmas tree. Carnival music is playing. A group of soldiers are listening to Hendrix in their bunker as Vietnamese soldiers scream in the background and bombs obliterate. There's no commander. Everyone is just trying to find some way of enduring the hell. As they depart the outpost to travel further down river towards Kurtz the bridge is blown up and the violence seems to accelerate. The whole scene is a face of the hell of Vietnam. They are almost to the end of the river and just about to the dark soul of this war.
The next two points along the river bring death. They first encounter enemies firing from the trees along the river. Everything glows with the red of their fire piercing towards the boat and Tyrone is killed while listening to a tape of his mother back home. Chief is bawling. Chef is just about to his end, and Willard looks tortured. Lance is still tripping. The next point along the river is more savage as spears are being thrown and one finds Chief and pierces through his heart. This is the real shit.
The survivors continue towards the end of the river and they begin to see skulls and torches along the bank of the river, and then finally reach the Kurtz compound. This is when the movie goes to even another level. There's been this anticipation of meeting this man and Coppola doesn't dissapoint with any of it. Like I said before with the opening scene, I had never experienced anything like this before. The perfect imagery, the depth of what was being said; It was a heavenly cinematic experience which is ironic because we had gone from hell on earth to the real underworld.
Willard is perched on top of the boat, the camera right behind him so you only see him atop the boat gliding towards the underworld as you look over his soldier, all the while this haunting musical heartbeat plays. There is a group of men in canoes awaiting his arrival. Everyone is covered in a dry pale mud. As he reaches them they create an opening for him to enter. I love this scene. Welcome to the underworld. Willard looks around him and sees what appears to be a Pagan Babylon with beautiful green everywhere but also Pagan statues of many forms. Dead bodies hang from trees and decapitated heads lie scattered randomly around the compound. Willard meets an american journalist who is way out there and might be a little crazy played by Dennis Hopper. I love this character. Soon after Willard is held captive, tied up in the rain and mud and suffering. Kurtz on a dark and rainy night drops Chef's decapitated head on his lap. He cries in horror and agony. This is the final stage of his experience.
We meet Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, and he is perfect for my expectations. He is terrifying, primal, brilliant, and mad. What Kurtz tells Willard completes this masterpiece of a movie and really puts it all together into a great dark poem.
"It is impossible to put into words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror has a face and you must make friends of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies." He then tells the story of inoculating the children of a village for polio during the war. Afterwards an old man ran after them crying. He returned to the village and the Vietcan had hacked the inoculated arm of every child in that village.
"I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out and I wanted to remember. I don't ever want to forget and then I realized like I was shot with a diamond bullet through my forehead. The genius. The genius of that. The will to do that. Perfect. Pure. Then I realized they were stronger than we because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men. These were trained soldiers with families who they loved but they had the strength to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men then our troubles would be over here very quickly. You have to have men who are moral but at the same time able to use their primordial instincts to kill without judgement because it's judgement that defeats us."
Willard has confronted the man. He has heard the words that he was meant to hear and finally he must face Kurtz once more and kill him. The ritual killing of Kurtz is crosscut with the ritual killing of a cow. Every image of this is perfect and beautiful. It feels mystical and primal beginning with the slow ascension of Willard from a pool of mud as "The End" once again is played. As Willard is about to kill Kurtz he hears him shouting "They 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." Kurtz's last words after Willard slaughters him with a machete are a whispered "The horror. The horror." Willard stands before Kurtz's people and they bow down before him and let him pass through with Lance back to their boat. There is a closeup of his face and he now has the same look in his eyes of Kurtz. The last image in the film which once again is perfect and beautiful is of three images superimposed upon each other. As we hear Kurtz's last words again there is a an image of fire and helicopters on the left, Willard's new face in the middle, and a Pagan statue on the right. Wow!!!!
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