Word: coppolas
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Perhaps if Coppola had succeeded in his efforts to recruit a star for the part, Willard might have commanded an audience's interest and empathy by sheer force of personal magnetism. Having no star, the director tried a more desperate solution: he commissioned Journalist Michael Herr (Dispatches) to write a narration that attempts to fill in Willard's personality ex post facto on the sound track. That narration-alternately sensitive, psychopathic, literary, gung-ho and antiwar-is self-contradictory and often at odds with Willard's behavior. It does not establish the protagonist as a credible figure...
...Willard's thinly sketched crewmates (Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms and Larry Fishburne). They are typical American kids who inexplicably travel together for days without ever engaging in intimate conversation. When they go mad in the film's second half, their transformations seem arbitrarily decreed by Coppola rather than dramatically justified. We feel nothing. Still, the crew members are almost Dostoyevskian in complexity compared with the deranged Kurtz. When we finally meet the renegade at his camp of Montagnard disciples, Apocalypse Now collapses into a terminal anticlimax. An overweight, bald Brando weaves...
...Coppola appears to believe that if Kurtz soliloquizes about "horror" and "moral terror," the audience will think that the movie has actually dealt with these matters. But when Willard assassinates Kurtz, we still do not know why the Green Beret went mad, the genesis of his large cult or even the identity of the many gruesome corpses and severed heads that lie strewn about his domain. Nor do we know why Willard, a sudden convert to Kurtz's undefined cause, goes ahead and kills him. By withholding this information, Coppola gives up his final chance to confront the issues...
...Space Odyssey, Willard's journey is designed as a psychedelic trip. Each stop along the way is meant to be more phantasmagoric than the last. In 2001, Kubrick successfully escalated his film at each stage, even topping the seemingly unbeatable light show with a more bizarre finale. Coppola, while creating progressively weirder war scenes, runs dry before he reaches his crucial imaginative leap: Kurtz's fastidiously designed compound looks as tame as a set in an oldtime jungle horror movie. His murder, which is archly intercut with the ritual slaughter of a carabao, is the film...
...real sadness of the movie, however, is not that Kurtz eludes Coppola's grasp, but that Viet Nam does. In its cold, haphazard way, Apocalypse Now does remind us that war is hell, but that is not the same thing as confronting the conflicts, agonies and moral chaos of this particular war. Yet, lest we lose our perspective in contemplating this disappointing effort, it should be remembered that the failure of an ambitious $30 million film is not a tragedy. The Viet Nam War was a tragedy. Apocalypse Now is but this decade's most extraordinary Hollywood folly...