1979’s Apocalypse Now reimagines the Vietnam War as pop art.

Jim Morrison sings The End in the background as slow-motion helicopters pass in front of a lush jungle.  The jungle erupts into flame while in a dingy hotel room, Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) gets drunks, practices his karate moves, and smashes a mirror before collapsing to the floor in tears.  The next morning, the hung-over and bandaged Willard ends up at a U.S. military base where he has a nice lunch with Lt. General Corman (G.D. Spradlin) and Col. Lucas (Harrison Ford) and a nearly silent man wearing an undone tie.  Willard is asked if it’s true that he assassinated an enemy colonel.  Willard replies that he did not and that the operation was classified, proving that he can both lie and follow military protocol.  Willard is told that a Col. Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando) has gone rogue and his mission is to go into Cambodia and terminate his command with “extreme” prejudice.  It’s a famous scene that features G.D. Spradlin delivering a brilliant monologue about good and evil and yet it’s often missed that Willard is getting his orders from Roger Corman and George Lucas.

(Roger Corman was the mentor of director Francis Ford Coppola while the pre-Star Wars George Lucas was Coppola’s business partner.  Indeed, Apocalypse Now was originally somewhat improbably planned to be a George Lucas film.)

Up the river, Willard heads on a patrol boat that is populated with characters who could have come out of an old World War II service drama.  Chief (Albert Hall) is tough and no-nonsense.  Lance (Sam Bottoms) is the goofy comic relief who likes to surf.  Clean (Laurence Fishburne) is the kid who is obviously doomed from the minute we first see him.  Chef (Fredric Forrest) is the overage, tightly-wound soldier who just wants to find mangoes in the jungle and who worries that, if he dies in a bad place, his soul won’t be able to find Heaven.  The Rolling Stones are heard on the boat’s radio.  Soldiers on the other patrol boats moon the boat and toss incendiary devices on the roof.  It’s like a frat prank war in the middle of a war.

Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) is a badass calvary officer whose helicopter raids are legendary amongst the enemy and a dedicated surfer who tries to turn every night into the equivalent of an AIP Beach Party film.  He’s a brilliant warrior who speaks with Malibu accent (“Charlie don’t surf!”) and who doesn’t flinch when a bomb goes off near him.  “I love the smell a napalm in the morning,” he says and, for a few moments, you really wish the film would just abandon Willard so we could spend more time with Kilgore.  “Some day this war is going to end,” he says with a reassuring nod, showing a non-neurotic attitude that is the opposite of Kurtz’s.  Willard says that he could tell Kilgore was going to get through the war without even a scratch and it’s true.  Kilgore doesn’t try to rationalize or understand things.  He just accepts the reality and adjusts.  He’s a true surfer.

The film grows progressively more surreal the closer the boat heads up the river and gets closer to Cambodia.  A USO show turns violent as soldiers go crazy at the sight of the Playboy Bunnies, dressed in denim outfits and cowboy hats and twirling cap guns like the love interest in a John Wayne western.  A visit to a bridge that is built every day and blown up every night is a neon-lit, beautiful nightmare.  Who’s the commanding officer?  No one knows and no one cares.

The closer Willard gets to Kurtz, the stranger the world gets.  Fog covers the jungles.  A tiger leaps out of nowhere.  Dennis Hopper shows up as a photojournalist who rambles as if Billy from Easy Rider headed over to Vietnam instead of going to Mardi Gras.  Scott Glenn stands silently in front of a temple, surrounded by dead bodies that feel as if they could have been brought over from an Italian cannibal film.  Kurtz, when he shows up, is an overweight, bald behemoth who talks in riddles and who hardly seem to be the fearsome warrior that he’s been described as being.  “The horror, the horror,” he says at one point in one of the few moments that links Apocalypse Now to its inspiration, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Directed by near-communist Francis Ford Coppola and written by the unapologetically right-wing John Milius, Apocalypse Now is actually less about the reality of Vietnam and more about how the images of the war shaped pop culture the world over.  It’s a reminder that Vietnam was known for being the first television war and that counterculture was not just made up of dropouts but also of writers, actors, and directors.  Kurtz may say that Willard’s been sent by grocery store clerks but actually, he’s been sent by the B-movie producers who first employed and mentored the directors and the actors who would eventually become the mainstays of the New Hollywood.  The film subverts many classic war film cliches but, at the same time, it stays true to others.  Clean dying while listening to a tape recording of his mother telling him not to get shot and to come home safe is the type of manipulative, heart-tugging moment that could have appeared in any number of World War II-era films.  And while Coppola has always said the film was meant to be anti-war, Col. Kilgore remains the most compelling character.  Most viewers would probably happily ride along with Kilgore while he flies over Vietnam and plays Wagner.  The striking images of Vietnam — the jungle, the explosions, the helicopters flying through the air — stay in the mind far more than the piles of dead bodies that appear in the background.

It’s a big, messy, and ultimately overwhelming film and, while watching it, it’s hard not to get the feeling that Coppola wasn’t totally sure what he was really trying to say.  It’s a glorious mess, full of stunning visuals, haunting music, and perhaps the best performance of Robert Duvall’s legendary career.  The film is too touched with genius to not be watchable but how one reacts overall to the film will probably depend on which version you see.

The original version, which was released in 1979 and was nominated for Best Picture, is relentless with its emphasis on getting up the river and finding Kurtz.  Willard obsesses on Kurtz and really doesn’t have much to do with the other people on the boat.  It gives the story some much-needed narrative momentum but it also makes Kurtz into such a legendary badass that it’s hard not to be disappointed when Willard actually meets him.  You’re left to wonder how, if Kurtz has been living in the jungle and fighting a brutal and never-ending guerilla war against the communists, he’s managed to gain so much weight.  Brando, who reportedly showed up on set unprepared and spent days improvising dialogue, gives a bizarre performance and it’s hard to view the Kurtz we meet as being the Kurtz we’ve heard about.  As strong as the film is, it’s hard not to be let down by who Kurtz ultimately turns out to be.

In 2001 and 2019, Coppola released two more versions of the film, Redux and The Final Cut.  These versions re-inserted a good deal of footage that was edited out of the original cut.  Most of that footage deals with Willard dealing with the crew on the boat and it’s easy to see why it was cut.  The scenes of Willard bonding with the crew feel out of character for both Willard and the rest of the crew.  A scene where Willard arranges for Clean, Lance, and Chef to spend time with the Playboy bunnies seems to go on forever and features some truly unfortunate acting.  Worst of all, Redux totally ruins Kilgore’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” monologue by having Willard suddenly steal his surf board.  Again, it’s out of character for Willard and it actually feels a bit disrespectful to Duvall’s performance to suddenly turn Kilgore into a buffoon.

But then there are moments that do work.  I actually like the lengthy French Plantation scene.  By the time Willard, Lance, and Chef stumble into the plantation,  the journey upriver has gotten so surreal that it makes a strange sort of sense that they would run into a large French family arguing politics while a clown tries to keep everyone distracted.  The new versions of the film are undeniably disjointed but they also shift the focus off of finding Kurtz and place it more on Willard discovering how weird things are getting in Vietnam.  As such, it’s less of a disappointment when Kurtz actually shows up.  Much as with the French Plantation scene, the journey has become so weird that Kurtz being overweight and pretentious feels somehow appropriate.

What all the versions of the film have in common is that they’re all essentially a neon-lit dream of pop cultural horror.  Is Apocalypse Now a horror film?  Critic Kim Newman argued that it owed a lot to the genre.  Certainly, that’s the case when Willard reaches the temple and finds himself surrounded by corpses and and detached heads.  Even before that, though, there are elements of horror.  The enemy is always unseen in the jungle and, when they attack, they do so quickly and without mercy.  In a scene that could almost have come from a Herzog film, the boat is attacked with toy arrows until suddenly, out of nowhere, someone throws a very real spear.  Until he’s revealed, Kurtz is a ghostly figure and Willard is the witch hunter, sent to root him out of his lair and set his followers on fire.  If the post-60s American horror genre was shaped by the images coming out of Vietnam then Apocalypse Now definitely deserves to be considered, at the very least, horror-adjacent.

Apocalypse Now was controversial when it was released.  (It’s troubled production had been the talk of Hollywood for years before Coppola finally finished his film.)  It was nominated for Best Picture but lost to the far more conventional Kramer vs Kramer.  Robert Duvall was the film’s sole acting nominee but he lost the award to Melvyn Douglas’s turn in Being There.  Douglas was very good in Being There and I imagine giving him the Oscar was also seen as a way of honoring his entire career.  That said, Duvall’s performance was amazing.  In his relatively brief screen time, Duvall somehow managed to take over and ground one of the most unruly films ever made.  The Oscar definitely should have gone to him.

As for the film itself, all three versions, flaws and all, are classics.  It’s a film that proves that genius can be found in even the messiest of productions.