On August 15, 1979, Francis Ford Coppola 's Apocalypse Now was released in theaters. The film received eight nominations at that year's Academy Awards, including the heaviest Best Picture award, before winning Best Cinematography and Best Sound.
After years of constant re-releases, Apocalypse Now finally grossed more than $100 million worldwide. Here's The Hollywood Reporter's first review of the film when it first came out.
Apocalypse Now
After the effects of Hurricane , Martin Sheen's heart attack and rewriting of the script, Coppola 's Apocalypse Now finally made it to the audience, but these problems The cost of the film soared to $31 million.
Although some critics, presumably based on the version shown earlier this year (which I didn't see), have expressed some reservations about the film, especially Marlon Brando 's appearance at the climax of the film's ending, Suffice it to say that in over two and a half hours, I was captivated by every minute of the film, and I firmly believe that this release by United Arts is one of the greatest films of our time.
I say this not only because of the film's crazy interpretation of war, but because Coppola brings a profound emotional experience and a pure mastery of art to the screen that not every audience understands . In the shocking opening paragraph of the film, the flapping sound of the helicopter's wings is reminiscent of strange insects in the jungle, which the audience needs to identify carefully before they can hear it.
Apocalypse Now cleverly blends nightmarish visuals and hallucinatory sounds, while in the background people fight, pray, and die, reminding us of the reality of these nightmares and hallucinations. Coppola also likes to present three or more layers of images in this film at the same time, with long, continuous optical overlapping, providing a unique "beauty" for modern, mechanical, and horrific warfare.
It's impossible for anyone to accuse Coppola -- who co-wrote Apocalypse Now with John Milius -- of being a war lover. The film is based on Joseph Conrad 's novel Heart of Darkness, and is set in the years after 's Vietnam War ended. Martin Sim plays Willard, an American officer who, like Marlow, the protagonist of Conrad 's writings, goes upstream to find a high-IQ killer/madman, only this time he travels through Vietnam and Cambodia 's rivers. The madman is Colonel Coates (Marlon Brando), a renegade Army officer. Willard was instructed to "suspend all command of Colonel Coates."
However, this voyage aboard a heavily armed patrol boat, the , was not so much a search for the Heart of Darkness. Said to be exploring the source of madness. In a series of brilliant scenes, Coppola slowly reveals that war is the greatest inhumane factor.
A Viet Cong-controlled village is ruthlessly destroyed by a fanatical colonel ( Robert Duvall ) whose two concerns are the welfare of his men and the number of corpses of his enemies - and, he makes it clear , he believes that all the "slopes" in front of him are enemies. (That's the typical Coppola way of doing it, and that's what characterizes the movie, he doesn't caricature the man. He's the kind of fearless, mindless leader that most GIs want to feel like he's there Be responsible.) The
patrol boat arrives at another village with a huge U.S. militaryGive it a stop, just then, the "playboy girls" in the helicopter are sent to perform for the men. They are like animals in a zoo, where the performers are separated from their audience by fences and trenches. But when the women's dance became too provocative, GIs started breaking through the fence and the performance was forced to stop. Coppola used the image of the zoo as a metaphor, implying that war turned people into beasts—only they were on the wrong side of the cage.
Further down the river, there is a bridge covered with lanterns that the army built during the day - "so the generals can claim our road is clear" - while the Viet Cong at night to destroy. Willard looked for the commander. "Who's the commander here?" he asks a rifleman who's in a trance from his drugs. "Aren't you?" the man replied. Nothing more succinctly sums up the flagging, disintegrating morale of the U.S. military in Vietnam. By contrast, the narration, written by Michael Hale and read by Willard, is so perceptive: "The Vietnamese people have only two choices—death or victory." Or burning planes and corpses - some American, some Vietnamese. In the face of death, it doesn't matter. As a visual confirmation of this growing insanity, one member of the squad (Sam Burtons), a surfing champion from California, begins to draw his own face and become more and more distant from the rest. (When we finally meet , Brando , his face is painted the same color, a shot that suggests that war is a kind of madness that doesn't scale,).
Colonel Coates is also a standout at West Point , but he slips into his own madness, and his final confrontation with Willard is also an important scene; Brando joins in a lot of individual performances, and it's the whole film In one of the most complex and literary scenes, Colonel Coates repeatedly quotes lines from T.S. Eliot's poem " Hollow Man ."
Look at the dim temple where Coates lives at the end of the video. That's the real "Heart of Darkness." In this spooky, out-of-control territory, his followers are killing each other and rotting everywhere. Corpses and severed heads. It's not hard for viewers to imagine the sight of Jonestown as well. People terribly surrendered their will to the so-called gods.
Colonel Coates emerges from the darkness, and in the smell of sickness and death, Coats tries to explain to Willard the reason for his madness. His own experiences form his philosophy. He is an excellent combat commander, a man dedicated to the realization of the "art of war" in his heart. Everything Willard saw on the road was a testament to Coates' philosophy: the soldiers' blind faith in their leaders, the men's sexual degradation, the unintentional destruction of life and property under true command, and most importantly Yes, the cheapness of human life and the randomness of death.
Coates has no particular distaste for killing or being killed, he just wants to know, who has the right to judge? And in the end when he was killed by Willard - which was intertwined with a horrific ritual of killing a buffalo - Coates' words echoed Conrad's: "Terror, terror..."
This is the final scene of the film, and it gives the film a unity and meaning that could easily become a catalogue of war horrors if not for Coppola. Coppola's apocalyptic vision goes far, and he investigates the evil lurking in people's hearts (especially those at the top of the military) and its relationship to fear, self-righteousness, and the desire for power. The military sent Willard, the crazy war-killing machine, to kill Coates, not because the man had surrendered, but simply because he was now a traitor living by his own rules. (In this case, the army "refused to cooperate" in this workNot surprising).
I'm sure there will be a lot of writing in the coming weeks about the hard work of Apocalypse Now, the details of which were kept as much as possible from the press during the actual filming as the budget went from an initial $12 million Soared to $31 million. Maybe Coppola thought he didn't want to reveal these details, but in the end the greatness of the movie justified the time, money, and effort spent. In my opinion, the answer is also yes. The copy shown last weekend, with neither opening title nor title, was 2 hours and 33 minutes long, and every second was epic.
of course the biggest credit goes to Coppola - he is director, producer, co-writer and composer (with his father Carmine Coppola on the score). In these identities, he seems to be testing not only his own abilities, but that of his chosen medium. If his talent is amazing, his profligacy is even more impressive.
This is evident in many of the panorama battle scenes shot with Technovision widescreen lenses with massive explosions of action in every frame; Coppola also used Dolby to enhance the sound to keep the audience for a while In the center of the battle, the next second is in the depths of the jungle.
However, as the film progresses to the "Playboy Girls" performance, the attack on the bridge, and finally to Coates' Cambodian station, we realize more and more that we are seeing a very special kind of image-light, Scenes and characters are carefully choreographed with operatic rigor for maximum visual impact; at other times, in the film's more relaxed moments, the same huge screen may be filled with a single person's face - Martin Sheen Or Marlon Brando looking straight at us through the camera lens. It must be said that Vittorio Storaro's delicate photography has long exceeded Coppola's requirements and expectations.
I have always believed that the success of a great director is not only due to one or two excellent actors who have worked together, but also the cooperation between the team. Apocalypse Now has a strong cast, made up of both professional and amateur actors. But I don't want to categorize the actors' performances. Needless to say, Brando's final appearance is like a statue of a Buddha, and his melancholy gives the film's final half-hour an intensity—a defeated lion that has lost his pride and power, but is still quite dangerous.
Colonel Coates has undoubtedly become another classic image of Brando. Perhaps even more surprising is that Martin Sheen's commanded, cynical Willard has been immersed in the war for so long that he has no interest in any other kind of life, but in his mission , at least in part to discover what war really is - turning a fine man like Coates (or Willard himself) into a monster. Willard had little self-awareness and never let go, watching the carnage around him with disbelief and horror. I think Martin Sheen's performance is definitely going to get something at the Oscars.
But, in all likelihood, the same goes for a supporting cast like Robert Duvall, who in battle wears a cavalry cap and cigar giving incomprehensible orders; Albert Hale as a patrol boat Brave commander with all the presence needed to bring the crew together. Frederick Forrest plays the most rational and reliable crew member on board; most importantly, Dennis Hopper plays a mentally deranged follower on Brando's side, and Hopper's performance makes this The characters appear unique.
I think Apocalypse Now is an outstanding, great movie worth the wait. My only concern is that since it came out so late, viewers might see it as another movie about the Vietnam Warcontending films without much interest.
It's clearly beyond the scope of Vietnam War films, like Conrad's novel, which is actually about the brutality of colonial exploitation. Whether it was Coppola or Conrad, the particular setting simply provided the stage for their deeper concern—an exploration of the inhuman motives among humans. They've all been successful in their own way, and they've been brilliant.
