Apocalypse Now : A film that stays in your psyche forever
“Saigon, shit I’m only in Saigon”
This opening line from Apocalypse Now prepares you for a journey. A journey into a man’s dark heart, the complexities and extremities of the human mind.
Jim Morrison’s ‘This is the End’ befits the opening sequence, showing Martin Sheen in a hotel room, staring at the fan, contemplating his fate, the home he left and Saigon, where he waits and waits, for a mission. There’s a gasoline explosion somewhere far away. The slow motion of burning flames juxtaposed with the burning insides of a man, who is fighting with himself is visual poetry at its best. The 4 minute long montage sets the course of this epic. To call it a ‘war epic’ might be unjustly.
There’s a subtext to each war, only the subtext is the main text in this one.
Captain Willard is summoned to Nha Trang for a classified mission. Col. Walt E Kurtz, a decorated officer and a General in the US Army has seemingly gone insane and taken matters into his own hands to win the Vietnam War. Without any decent restraint, he has been out in the jungles of Cambodia, with his army of Montagnard people who have come to regard him as their God. They follow his orders and have set up base so high upriver that Kurtz (Marlon Brando) has gone out of reach of the Army command. Capt. Willard’s mission is to terminate the General’s command.
Martin Sheen, who plays Capt. Willard is the narrator and the lens through which we see the events unfold. His passive face and deep ocean blue eyes have a distinct quality of taking us along for a ride, albeit, sans any judgement. What he sees, reads and encounters in his quest for Kurtz has the audience in rapture and we anticipate alongside him, the moment when he will finally encounter the Man.
Aiding him are four soldiers and their patrol boat, who are responsible for escorting the Captain to his classified destination, no questions asked. They are mainly boys, who are looking for nothing more than a ticket home. Their journey on the Nung river has plans for them, a few surprises and the horror that awaits.
Francis Ford Coppola, the director, chose to locate this film in Philippines, which has a similar terrain, people and the essence of Vietnam. When talking about Apocalypse Now, he said
“My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.”
The making of this masterpiece hit many obstacles, ranging from typhoons, bad weather, actor’s health (Martin Sheen had a heart attack during the shoot), going way over budget and Marlon Brando appearing on the sets unprepared and overweight. An award winning documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), has attempted to chronicle the director’s and crew’s experience in filming this exceptional film that has stood the test of time.
The film has an episodic quality to it, which is balanced by the liquid tracks of the river, engulfing us deeper and deeper as we proceed. There are many memorable scenes, one of them being the air-strike one, where helicopters are approaching a village like large metallic flies, lined up in perfect symmetry. The scene in a way signifies the War, which was largely fought in air, air-strikes being the US mastercard. That they still lost to a small group of North Vietnamese Army using their guerilla warfare techniques is a testament to the power of the Force.
Initially George Lucas wanted to direct the film in 1970 but since the war was still going on, it did not get many takers then. However, he took the basic premise of how a small group (the Vietnamese) can defeat a big empire (the US) by mere power of the Force to a galaxy far far away and the Star Wars franchise as we know it now was born.
In a delightful role as a cheery yet deadly Commanding Officer is Robert Duvall (Bill Kilgore). He loves his boys, is optimistic about the war and is a surfing enthusiast. Attacking a village held by Charlie, he blasts Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries from the sky. One of Willard’s companions on the boat, Lance (Sam Bottoms), is a professional surfer whom Kilgore takes a liking to. He has a brazen disregard for potential danger, which is evident when he suggests Lance to go surfing with him on the beach after the firing is over. On being told that it could be dangerous, he shouts at a soldier saying “Charlie don’t surf!” A complex role to play, of a CO who knows he’ll get out of the war unscathed, Duvall is a treat to watch.
The film may be set in Vietnam, but it gives you a California feel, with soldiers surfing on R n R, listening to rock ‘n’ roll on the radio, playboy bunnies flown from the US for the soldiers’ entertainment and The Doors soundtrack which creates one of the best opening sequences in film history.
However, the song ‘This is the End’ is only used in the beginning and in the End, when one might think it’s a fantastic soundtrack to lace the entire film with and give the audience that emotional high without any effort. The exceptional sound designer Walter Murch said “It felt too much on the nose” and did away with the idea, creating the entire soundtrack from scratch.
Francis Coppola invited Mickey Hart and his drummers, who created the entire soundtrack by looking at the picture. For a scene, Murch needed the sound of a thousand crickets, which he achieved by multiplying the sound of one single cricket, over and over again to get that harmonic sound. He received the Academy Award for Best Sound Designing in 1980 for the film.
The superior and clever editing by Murch (one of the four editors who worked on the film) gave the film a new life, when he edited the re-cut version ‘Apocalypse Now Redux’ in 2001. This version had many new scenes installed, which had earlier been cut due to the length of the film. Since many crucial scenes were not shot due to bad weather, Murch found a way around it, giving it the fluidity, texture and much more humor.
Dennis Hopper as the drug-crazed photojournalist who has come to worship the Man is a revelation. There is genius in his supposedly mad demeanour, who mouths dialogues faster than a bullet. When he talks to Willard, you see there’s purpose to his purposeless talks, meaning to chaos and a madness which is surprisingly sane. He describes Kurtz as “A poet warrior in the classic sense”, showing us how we’ve got him all wrong. He brings dimensions to Kurtz and adds a zaniness which is unforgettable.
When we finally have a face to Kurtz, the officer who has flipped and gone so deep into his insanities that he can derive logic out of it, there’s Marlon Brando bringing the complex character alive and how. You see a man, who is hardened by the war, his disillusionment with the system and a resolve which has gone beyond him and taken him along to unknown, dark places. Brando’s spine-chilling voice, his words flowing like a river and his goth-like, shadowy appearance hypnotizes you with his brilliance.
‘Can you picture what will be, so limitless and free’
The above line from the song ‘This is the End’ is appropriate to what Kurtz had become. Being so far away from himself, away from his judgement of his ownself, to achieve his motto ‘Apocalypse Now’, he set himself free. The price for this freedom was his own sanity, his soul that had been ripped apart. There’s sympathy for Kurtz, yet we want him dead. Willard, in the end says
“Even the jungle wanted him dead. It’s who he took his orders from anyway.”
It speaks volumes about the Man he was, where he came from and where he was heading.
Apocalypse Now is much deeper in it’s pursuit of creating art, that’s lasting and defies the decaying response to time. A film which was made under the darkest, maddest and most difficult circumstances, it stands as a proof of how important it is to take risks, to go into the unknown and being true to your vision, free from the opinions of others.
Brando’s last words echo in your mind even after the film has ended. We end up almost being grateful to have not known ‘the horrors’.
Trivia
Although an adaptation from Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, this film takes only little from it and deviates largely into a different angle altogether, blending the premise of a trader who has come to lord over a small group of people in Congo into the Vietnam War.
Francis Coppola is seen in a small scene as a documentary filmmaker who’s covering the war.
A young officer who tells Willard about Kurtz and his operating outside of the program is played by Harrison Ford, who was relatively less famous until the Star Wars franchise turned him into the mega star he is today.
Helicopter sound is fundamental to Apocalypse Now, which is incidentally the first sound we hear as the film opens.
Brando was deliberately shot in the shadows, with clever lighting done around him to hide his rather overweight body. He insisted on wearing black since he could not fit in the Green Beret uniform that Francis Coppola had picked out for him.
