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Apocalypse Again? Review by Adrian Hyland In the 25 years since its release, "Apocalypse Now", every teenager's favourite war film, has attained a mythological status held by few motion pictures. The over-reaching ambition of its director, Francis Coppola, the hallucinatory quality of its imagery, and finally the vagueness of its statements on 'war' have all contributed to its stature as a cult classic. Other Vietnam films may have come and gone, but none is as firmly cemented in the public consciousness as a 'work of art', an original. The years have been kind to "Apocalypse Now", and upon its re-release last year as "Apocalypse Now - Redux", complete with additional scenes, it was greeted in Europe with the kind of ecstatic, unequivocal reviews conspicuously absent when the original first hit the screens in 1979. That the jump in critical opinion can be ascribed to the inclusion of the new footage is doubtful. For all its flaws, the original at least achieved an atmosphere of apprehension; there was never the element of dullness that Coppola has introduced to the new version by dragging these leaden, uninspired scenes out of the vault. They only confirm the original decision to leave them out as a wise one. There is extra footage of Willard's troops stealing a surfboard from under the nose of Robert Duvall's Kilgore, and a new, seemingly endless sequence that involves the playboy bunnies in possibly the most boring orgy you'll ever witness. Other minor additions surface here and there, and the newly-mastered sound is as good as you would expect, but the curiosity value of "Redux" largely rests with the 'French Plantation' scene, which only narrowly missed the original cut. You'll know it when it begins; suddenly you feel transported to another cinema where you are watching not "Apocalypse Now", but "Creatures From The Lagoon", or one of the Roger Corman B-Movie horrors that Coppola cut his teeth on. The acting is appropriately camp. This was meant to be the scene in which America's action in Vietnam was placed in a wider context, that of the Europeans who had been occupying the country previously. Two things obviously happened; firstly the acting was so bad that it rendered the scene unusable, and secondly Coppola, clearly having lost touch with his material, was unable to provide any more political insight than the line spoken by one of the Frenchmen who live on the plantation: "You Americans are fighting for the biggest nothing in history." By 1979 pretty much the whole world already knew that, so the director ditched the scene. That Coppola lost his way with the material is understandable, when you consider his mind must have been monumentally pre-occupied. The story of the making of "Apocalypse Now" (captured with raw intensity by Coppola's wife, Eleanor, in her documentary "Hearts of Darkness"), far surpasses that of the film in its depiction of a megalomaniac railing against the forces of nature. Imagine the scenario: from the outset Coppola encounters problems with actors, none of whom are willing to work in the jungles of the Philippines on what will potentially be a gruelling shoot. McQueen, Redford, Pacino, Nicholson and James Caan all turn down roles for this reason. The director is left with Harvey Keitel, seemingly the only man left in Hollywood unafraid of creepy-crawlies and foreign food, as Willard, the central character. Keitel, raised on the mean streets of New York, lasts just one highly uncomfortable month before he is replaced by Martin Sheen. Meanwhile, the helicopters on loan from the Philippine Army are being requisitioned without warning, during shooting, by Ferdinand Marcos' troops, for some 'shooting' of their own, this time in a real war. This minor inconvenience is put into perspective, three months into the shoot, by the arrival of Hurricane Olga, which destroys all of the sets and leaves Coppola and his wife in hospital suffering from malnutrition. Then Brando arrives. Fresh from an exhausting summer on his Tahitian island, he turns up for his two weeks work (salary: $3.5 million), weighing 130 kilos and expressing his usual desire to improvise his way through his entire role. As he has not learned any of the few lines Coppola has written for him, he gets his way. (The dire psychobabble Brando mistook for profundity can be heard in the film's overwhelmingly pretentious final half an hour). Job complete, Brando leaves the director and his consorts to brave the remaining months. One of these people is Martin Sheen, now 11 months into shooting, who one evening suffers from sharp pains in his chest and is rushed to hospital, where doctors determine he has suffered a near-fatal heart attack. Coppola's dilemma is obvious; does he send for another actor, re-shoot most of the film and double the already doubled budget? Or does he play down the seriousness of the 'episode' and extend shooting further, allowing Sheen time to recover before finishing his scenes? Coppola chooses the latter and shooting finally ends in May 1977, 15 months after he first called action, and $15 million over his original budget of $12 million. Now the fun will really start. He has 230 hours of footage to edit! Is it any wonder that, amongst all of this, he lost sight of the story? By his own admission, Coppola was not a politically motivated man. Clearly he was attracted to the project not by the opportunity to 'say something' about the nature of war, but by the cinematic potential of the subject matter. His real interest, which can be divined simply by watching the film, lay in the exploration of the kind of scale that only war and sci-fi, as genres, can support. He was turned on by the idea of coordinating sound and vision into an 'assault on the senses', the likes of which no one would have seen before. He even designed a groundbreaking 'Quadraphonic' sound recording system to help him achieve this. He would figure out what it all meant later, when he had finished the script. The original "Apocalypse Now" can be seen now for what it is; the film that drew Coppola into an on-running fascination with technology and 'the medium', away from his theatrical screenwriting roots, and into the trailer from which he directed the film that was to finally bankrupt him, "One From The Heart". So preoccupied was he with the logistical demands of shooting sequences such as the "Ride of the Valkyries" air raid, (a stunning action scene and the climax of the film, two hours too soon), that he felt unable to function as a creative force in the writing of the script. Why else would he have sent for Michael Herr when he realised the film needed a voiceover? Obviously Coppola had no idea what was going through his central character's head, and so handed the job to someone he thought would. Francis Ford Coppola, with three Oscars for best screenwriter sitting at home, delegated the task of constructing his film's storytelling device to a man who'd never worked on a movie before. As a result, much of the voiceover sounds dated and sub-Mailer, the way Herr's own book "Dispatches" does, with lines like: "Even the jungle wanted him dead, and after all that's who he took his orders from." Pardon? (In fact much of the stoned-adolescent's-idea-of-war shtick can be attributed to the other major creative force involved in "Apocalypse Now", John Milius, the notoriously right-wing screenwriter/director responsible for such masterpieces as "Conan The Barbarian".) All of this is a million miles away from the economical, understated mastery of Coppola's first two "Godfather" films, where we really cared about the characters, despite the fact that they were killers. We don't care about anyone in "Apocalypse Now", and I believe this has a lot to do with the central casting of Martin Sheen. In "The Godfather", Al Pacino was able to convey the strength and intelligence that lay behind Michael's passive exterior. The suggestive quality of his poker face carried the first film, and in Part Two we are witness to what appears to be something dying inside of him; the expression remains the same but there has been a horrible progression. Martin Sheen doesn't have this suggestiveness as an actor. His qualities are pictorial, and peculiarly American. (The first thing one remembers about his performance is the way his fringe hangs just-so.) There is nothing unpredictable about him, and this may have been the attraction for Coppola. Willard, an army man, is a man who despite the hallucinatory distractions of his trip up the river basically follows his orders. Sheen was perfect! With his bland yet iconic All-American prettiness and bewildered passivity, he would embody the decadence of the U.S. war on Vietnam. But Coppola had chosen an actor who was unable to connect with his audience. When Willard tells of his desire to confront Kurtz, we don't believe him; they sound like the words of a screenwriter. One can only imagine the kind of desire Harvey Keitel might have brought to Willard's psychological make-up. Maybe Coppola wouldn't have needed the voiceover. Maybe we would have identified with the character, and experienced the nightmare journey up the river with him. But Sheen's passive protagonist makes no decisions, shows no emotion, and has no reaction to what is going on around him. Which brings us to the big question. What the hell is "Apocalypse Now" about, anyway? Coppola spoke in interviews of his film being about 'moral ambiguity', the grey area between good and evil. This mantra can also be applied to the first two "Godfather"s and the director's other great film, "The Conversation". However in those cases the themes and conflicts were dramatised, and consequently all three films have something profound to say about human nature. Coppola failed as a dramatist on "Apocalypse Now" and the result is that all we are left with on the screen are the director's obsessions laid bare. The opening bars of "The End", by The Doors, set the tone for what will follow: two and a half hours of pure Hollywood, carefully disguised as Vietnam. From the beautifully choreographed plumes of water rocketing into the orange sky, reminiscent of the classic musicals that Coppola loved, to the magnetic posturing of Robert Duvall's Kilgore as he attempts to convert Vietnam into a Californian beach party, no 'War' film, before or since, has made violence seem so glamorous. Certainly no Vietnam film shows less interest in indigenous Vietnamese, or more interest in war as an incandescent, beautiful spectacle, an aesthetic pleasure. (A great visual stylist might have pulled it off, but Coppola's vision lacks acuity; we don't feel the shock of the new as we take in the imagery. Even the heads-on-sticks finale betrays a fatal lack of imagination. The actors look more surprised than people in the audience.) When Frederic Forrest's Louisiana born-and-bred chef, upon being spooked by a tiger, suddenly breaks into an unmistakably Southern Californian drawl, it becomes clear that Coppola is so absorbed in the druggy mystique of Los Angeles circa 1967 that he has taken it with him to Vietnam. When Brando finally turns up at the end, spouting apocalyptic mumbo-jumbo, the reference to California's greatest counter-culture hero, Charles Manson, is obvious, as is the answer to our big question: "Apocalypse Now" is not about what happened in the Vietnam war, it's about what Coppola could see from the window of his Hollywood mansion. Despite all of its efforts to be taken seriously, it's a big, empty, decadence trip. There still remains the question as to why the re-release, 20 years later, with below-par additional footage? Surely "Apocalypse Now" was too long already? Can the answer be found simply in Coppola's bank balance? "One From The Heart" destroyed him financially, and he has had only a couple of subsequent hits, but wasn't his 1998 legal victory over Warner Brothers, when he was awarded $60 million in damages, enough to ensure financial security for him and his family? Although he stands to make a lot of money off "Redux", it is doubtful that this is the main reason for the revisiting of such a traumatic and, by all accounts, insane project. Hollywood stories abound of Coppola's fondness for "mogulling it up", and it seems that the power and wealth accorded him when he became the first 'superstar' director felt very comfortable to him. He was always torn between the knowledge that he was an artist, a maker of 'personal' films, and the desire to make films the public would line up to see. For all his mutterings about 'art' and 'what he wanted to say', let's not forget that before he completed editing "Apocalypse Now" he held public test screenings, to ascertain what it would be OK for him to say. Francis Ford Coppola always loved the limelight. And this year at Cannes, courtesy of "Apocalypse Now - Redux", he was able to taste, once again, the glory of being an 'important' filmmaker. The original "Apocalypse Now" is one of those rare films that, despite its flaws, almost demands seeing, both as a warning against what can happen to an artist when his ego leads him away from his instincts, and as a death knell for the creative lives of Brando and Coppola, both unique film artists. The "Redux" version is for 'Empire' readers only. However, if you want to see something to really make your jaw drop, I recommend the documentary "Hearts of Darkness". "A cartoon. It's a kind of cocaine fantasy. It's an infatuation with explosions and blood. The characters are all sterile. There's no sense of human interaction." - Al Santoli, infantry sergeant in Vietnam, on "Apocalypse Now". [Quote from "Francis Ford Coppola: A Film-makers Life" by Michael Schumacher, Bloomsbury 1999.] — Adrian Hyland studied post-production at South Seas Film & Television School. He now works as a news editor at TV3. |