What Makes "Apocalypse Now" Great.

40 years later, Francis Ford Coppola's cinematic masterpiece of the horror and dehumanization of the Vietnam war still stands as a breathtaking and disturbing look into the darkest parts of the human soul, and one of, if not the greatest war film ever made.

Set during the height of the conflict in Vietnam, the film follows the mission of Special operations Officer Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) who is assigned to find and kill a Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a renegade officer who has been driven insane and now commands a huge number of followers in the jungles of Cambodia. Escorting by a group of Navy men ( Laurence Fishburne, Fredric Forest, Albert Hall, and Sam Bottoms) in a Navy Patrol Boat down the river, which slowly goes from a journey of finding and terminating a rogue officer to a psychological descent representing the madness and brutality of the Vietnam War.

The best way to describe the look and feel of Apocalypse Now is surreal, The masterful Cinematography by Vittorio Storaro and the unique color palette give the film an almost dreamlike and otherworldly feel that looks like something out of a nightmare. The psychedelic musical by Carmine Coppola and Francis himself also helps give the audience a feel of unease, and whenever it plays, your just waiting for something bad to happen.

Coppola masterfully captures the destruction and madness of the Vietnam War that no filmmaker has been able to replicate before or since. The opening scene with the helicopters flying over the trees and the transformation of the beautiful landscape to a burning ruin with the amazing song "The End" by "The Doors" playing in the background perfectly establishes those aspects of the war, and that hypnotic sound of the helicopters hovering above the trees is something that has always stuck with me ever since I saw it the first time. The hypocrisy of the situation is also frequently brought to the forefront, the army tells Willard that Kurtz has been charged with murder which strikes Willard as confusing more than anything else, and later says in his narration that "Charging a man with murder here was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500". The destruction during the iconic Ride of The Valkyries sequence being played in sequence to the classical music makes the destruction a symphony in it of itself, it's gotten to the point where many people can't think of this scene of destruction when they hear The Ride of The Valkyries playing. It is this amazing sequence that perfectly shows how much of a disorganized mess the Vietnam War was. During the helicopter raid, there doesn't seem to be much effort to sort out the difference between the enemy or the innocent civilian. The battalion's Colonel, quite accurately named "Kilgore" (Robert Duvall) than sets out to find a surfing spot during the destruction and permits his men to surf the waves in the middle of a siege and even tells them "You either surf or fight". Later in the film during the arrival at "Du Lung Bridge" outpost, which is last army outpost before arriving in Cambodia, the bridge is in chaos and disarray with no sense of order. Willard finds just a bunch of younger soldiers who have no idea what there doing, Willard even asks who the commanding officer is, and one of the men simply responds with "Ain't you?". This scene is further made more dreary with the frequent switches from dark and light in the camera, as well as the haunting music in the background. Seeing as how the bridge is the last American outpost before going into Kurtz's territory, and the destruction going on around it, the scene can be seen as passing through the gates of hell, where beyond the bridge, only death and misery awaits.

All the performances are excellent even to the smallest of characters, in fact, it's those minor characters that steal the show. As great as Martin Sheen is in film, it's the side characters that stick with you the most. Robert Duvall makes the most of his limited screen time as Kilgore, a surfing fanatic and commander of a battalion who is often completely oblivious to the violence around him and seems to take a disturbing level of pride in his work, shown in having his helicopters play classical music to scare the Viet Cong, and his love for the smell of napalm in the mourning, saying it smells like "Victory". Marlon Brando is also amazing as the renegade Kurtz who despite not being shown till the last 30 minutes there is so much build-up to seeing him that Willard's anticipation and curiosity of finding the man matches your own, and when we finally do see Brando, he leaves such an impression in his performance that you can't take your eyes off him. Dennis Hopper is also great as a stoner photojournalist who has become obsessed with Kurtz's teachings and blindly worships him as a "poet" and a "great man" saying "he's enlarged my mind", and that "he can be terrible, and he can be mean, but he can be right". Another great character is "Chief" (Albert Hall) the commander of the patrol boat who frequently clashes with Willard, mostly regarding Willard's mission conflicting with Chief's established rules of the river, and goal of keeping his men safe.

Overall, I think the main thing Coppola was trying to show other than the "war is hell'" message, was the psychological journey of what causes a man to lose himself into madness. The entire journey of finding Kurtz can be seen as a symbolic representation of Kurtz's actual descent, as the deeper in the jungle they go, the journey becomes more and more brutal and unforgiving. there's an especially powerful sequence where the young Gunner "Clean" is killed during an ambush while an audio recording sent by his mother continues to play over his dead body, it becomes even more tragic when you consider how young Clean is (17), and that Clean's mother currently has no idea that she will never see her son again. It's this journey that makes Apocalypse Now a disturbing, but powerful viewing experience. The Horror indeed.