Review of Apocalypse Now (1979) by Joe C — 04 Jan 2015

**Theatrical version, not the Redux**.

Apocalypse Now is a film famous many things, most dubiously taking three years to edit, having a "making-of" documentary more famous than most movies, and bankrupting Francis Ford Coppola so severely that he had to work as a hired gun for a decade. All's well that ends well, and it ends very well indeed. Because Apocalypse Now is lauded as one of the greatest films ever; a hallucinogenic, audacious sensory maelstrom that's both filmed on a massive scale, and hyper-concentrated on its characters. At the height of the Vietnam War, drunk, restless Captain Willard is sent on a mission to terminate a Colonel who has gone completely insane and set up a murderous cult in Cambodia. Coppola takes his time building up the characters, turning the screws unbearably tightly, and slowly descending us into a pit of moral decay to the point where the reveal of Marlon Brando is almost anticlimactic. Few films before or since have been so technically and stylistically daring. We will never see its like again.