Apocalypse Now

I really don't know what to think of this movie. It is a sprawling, ambitious mess of a movie. It belabors points until you can no longer say it's beating a dead horse, because nothing of the horse's corpse remains. There are only two characters in the movie: those whose emotions have imploded like a white dwarf star, and people so nuts, they're genetically half-pecan. In one scene, it'll have a clearly around-the-bend soldier glorifying war as exhilarating, the only purpose of man, so fundamental to life itself that it can happen in the background while you take up recreational activities ... and in another scene, we see how war, especially with Vietnam being zero-sum game long before it ended, can break a soldier, strip away his humanity, make him think that fighting for one's life is more ideal a condition than enjoying that life. It dresses up what is, stripped to the bone, an average 90-minute Chuck Norris flick with so many platitudes and grandiose language, you'd swear you were listening to open-mic night at the local coffee shop's poetry slam. It is a movie as subtle and nuanced as a clown at a funeral. Its lasting legacy are a few quotes and a production almost as troubled as the war it chronicles. It is also a poignant look at the ways in which war warped and bends the psyche into unrecognizable shapes no one would dare call human: Martin Sheen's Willard, a man so inoculated to war that he would rather divorce his wife and take a life-threatening mission than live in peace. Kilgore's bloodthirsty audacity, prioritizing surfing over survival. And Kurtz, all but admitting that while he believes he's discovered how to perfect a solider and an army, he also knows it is so monstrous, he's too far gone to function as a human being. Apocalypse Now's ambition is, indeed, too big for its own good, but it also unmistakably undiluted. There is no denying this is Francis Ford Coppola's vision. He seeks to alarm, to shake violently, to rouse the viewer out of a stupor. Where The Deer Hunter showed Vietnam's trauma as a real bummer, Apocalypse Now shoves your face into its horrors. It is exposure therapy in cinematic form, and it never once compromises itself in that regard. I have a certain amount of begrudging, weird respect for this movie. I respect what it's trying to do, and I think it is far more effective than The Deer Hunter was. But I also think Coppola got swallowed up in the artifice he was erecting instead of letting the emotions come through. He made war too operatic for the significance of the story and its characters to land for me. So while I can appreciate what he was trying to do, I'd rather see a movie that just gets to the point.