Word: filming
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...such is the nature of the entire film that even these hallucinatory passages are not so powerful as they might be. At times they are as anesthetizing as the Viet Nam footage that once dominated TV's evening newscasts. What is missing from these panoramas of death is a human context. There are almost no well-defined characters in Apocalypse Now. The biggest nonentity of all, sadly enough, is Willard. We are supposed to see the movie through his eyes-which are frequently superimposed on the film's images-but those eyes tell us nothing...
...contradictory and often at odds with Willard's behavior. It does not establish the protagonist as a credible figure or begin to achieve Coppola's loftier goal of charting Willard's tailspin into psychological terror. Eventually, the voice-over commentary becomes a makeshift panacea for the film's many other defects: it hastily clarifies plot points and states themes that Coppola has uncharacteristically failed to develop through action, dialogue and pictures. This strategy is as hopeless as trying to glue together a $30 million airplane with wads of bubble...
Certainly the narration does nothing to rescue 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...
...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 his film initially intended to explore. The journey into America's Viet Nam madness-not to mention the journey into Willard's and Kurtz's souls-reaches its dead end in a quagmire of freshman English class recitations...
...plain theater. Like the apocalyptic space journey in Kubrick's very similarly structured 2001: A 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...