Review of Apocalypse Now (1979) by Allen G — 19 Feb 2013

Wow. I just don't even know where to begin. Have you ever had one of those dreams where you are attacked by a grizzly bear while on an African safari so you swim to the surface and turn into a pterodactyl in order to fly away to safety? Yeah, Apocalypse Now is a little bit like that. It starts off as a Vietnam War movie, and looks great all the way to the end, but the story - the story - it is insane! The film would have been more aptly titled, "Captain Benjamin Willard's Expedition to the Temple of Nonsense".

The further up the river they get, the more drugged out the movie starts to feel, which at first I thought was going to be a reference to post-traumatic stress...nope, just good old fashion lunacy. It starts with the impossible behavior of Lt. Col. Kilgore, but I just wrote that off as a strange & misplaced attempt at humor, but then we get to the bridge battle and the movie begins to become mind-numbingly odd. I can't even describe how this movie descends swirling around the toilet bowl of absurdity before it flushes down to the sewer of utter madness. My head began to hurt the last half an hour; it was so supremely bizarre. It is hard to imagine how it gradually changes gears from a normal enough war movie to a drugged out nonsensical waste of time in the jungle! I'm not being facetious, I am serious, literally, my head actually hurts from my exercise in futility in trying to weave together this mess of loose ends.

Film critics can be such sheep. Sure you can be black sheep if you want, but you are every bit as much cowardly conformists as your more numerous mainstream counterparts; mindless cowardly conformity to a subgroup is still conformity. To argue this film a masterpiece requires a desperate search for figurative meaning, a smothering of common sense, and is a sad attempt at acceptance into a group of pseudo-intellectuals. This films reputation is because of who made it, when he made it, and groupthink...period. Colonel Kurtz was not some great free thinker (there have been many about whom films have been and could be made), nor was anyone in his outrageously improbable personality cult. How did he persuade this brutally savage & primitive people to exalt him by the way? How did he even communicate with them? I suppose he learned their language...right.

This is not a matter of taste. This movie is simply terrible, the story is crazily incongruent, and anyone with eyes to see and a mind to think will agree. The film itself is very well made, but that is not even close to enough to make the movie as a whole worthwhile. If you want a film about humanity's imperfections, if you want a film about the horrors, consequences, or idiocy of war, if you want a film about thinking for yourself and doing your own thing, if you want a film about political hypocrisy - whatever you want, please, just do yourself a favor and watch another movie. In fact, Apocalypse Now is so long you can watch two.