Word: willard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first instincts were correct: there was a fine idea for a movie here. Inspired by Joseph Conrad's novella 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...
Unfortunately, the director never does get around to telling the story of either character's personal apocalypse. Instead, he uses part of Willard's river journey as a pretext to unveil a series of large-scale, self-contained set pieces-an impersonal tour of the war front. Though these sequences do not add up to a movie, they are feverishly imagined and brilliantly shot (by Bertolucci's favorite cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro). Indeed, the first of these war scenes may be the most spectacular battle ever created for a film. With a megalomaniacal officer (Robert Duvall) leading...
Shocks of a more surreal nature follow. When Willard meets up with a bump-and-grind U.S.O. show in the proverbial middle of nowhere, Coppola creates a haunting spectacle of corrupt American values loose in an alien world. Later, Willard encounters a platoon of spaced-out black G.I.s who are shooting aimlessly into the night without benefit of a commanding officer. "It's the asshole of the world," says one fleeing soldier. Coppola's eerie visions, sculpted out of smoke, fire and darkness, make the words real...
...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. It is not Sheen's fault; no one has written him a role. He is neither the initially innocent traveler of Conrad...
...stopped agonizing over how it 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...