Review of Apocalypse Now (1979) by Danny R — 25 Jul 2012

One of the most important cinematic achievements of the 20th century, a visually sumptuous and dramatically charged movie masterpiece. Francis Ford Coppola 's brilliant and controversial Vietnam war epic, about a intelligence assassin Captain Willard, played by Martin Sheen in a haunting tour-de-force performance who is given a hazardous mission upriver into Cambodia to track down and terminate with " extreme prejudice," a renegade officer who has gone insane Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando in a superbly effective performance who leads his legion of Montaghard tribesmen on random genocide missions, the trip up river becomes a mesmerizing odyssey full of surreal encounters, this classic film has some of the most remarkable scenes ever filmed, one of them being the famous Huey helicopter gunship attack on a Vietcong village, led by Robert Duvall in a monumental Oscar-nominated performance, as Lt.

. Col. Kilgore who loves to play Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" as his fleet of helicopter gunships bombards the villagers, Kilgore's line that he "loves the smell of napalm in the morning" is one of the most oft-quoted lines in the annals of the cinema.

Impeccable performances from the supporting cast that includes Frederic Forrest, Dennis Hopper, Samuel Bottoms, Albert Hall, Lawrence Fishburne, Harrison Ford and G.D. Spradlin, staggering Oscar winning cinematography by Vittorio Storaro, with a perfectly eerie and insidious score by Carmine Coppola & Francis Ford Coppola, and a magnificent production design by Dean Tavoularis.

Francis Ford Coppola masterful direction captures the true hellishness and insanity of the Vietnam war, a truly unforgettable and stunning hallucinogenic movie experience, that earned 8 Academy Awards nominations including Best Picture and Best Director: Francis Ford Coppola "Apocalypse Now" is number 28, on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest films ever made.

Highly Recommended.