Word: kurtz
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...Heart of Darkness, Coppola wanted to portray America's Viet Nam adventure as a literal and metaphysical journey into madness. The literal journey is taken by Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), an officer who is commanded to travel upriver from Saigon to Cambodia. His mission is to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once exemplary Green Beret who has now gone crazy and set up a kingdom of murder in the darkest jungle. "There is no way to tell [Kurtz's] story without telling my own," Willard explains early on. Coppola apparently hoped that by dramatizing both Kurtz...
...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 in and out of the shadows of his temple headquarters, doing little more than spouting quotations from Conrad and T.S. Eliot...
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...
...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's only poorly shot death scene. Apocalypse Now's much talked-about discarded ending - another air raid - would...
...will all turn out. After three years, $30 million, a typhoon named Olga and a shared Cannes Film Festival's Golden Palm for Best Picture, Director Coppola still struggled to find an ending for his Viet Nam epic, Apocalypse Now. Should Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) hack Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) to death and then emerge from the colonel's hideout? Or should Willard kill Kurtz, sail down the river and then order the site bombed into the Stone Age, or at least until the credits roll? Each finish was filmed, and each had its supporters, with the movie...