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Apocalypse Now!

Posted by Bruce from DC (B) on December 30, 2002 at 17:04:42

Having just acquired a DVD player and one of my college-age daughters having rented the DVD for some course assignment, I had occasion to watch this film for the first time since it came out, in 1979. It is a self-indulgent film that embodies a great concept but fails in the execution. But for its anti-war message that resonates with critics' political views, I think it would have been dismissed long ago and largely forgotten.

The concept of the film is great: a riff on Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" with a journey upriver deeper into the moral and physical jungle in search of an army colonel who has become lost in the moral ambiguities of that particular war. This is a great concept and would have made a great film.

In my opinion, there are two problems -- a big one and a small one.

The big one is that Coppola had a second concept that was inconsistent with the first -- war as a horrible absurdity. This, of course, was Joseph Heller's invention in "Catch-22," a great book unsuccessfully brought to film. The "war as an absurdity" concept is responsible for the middle part of the film -- a complete narrative detour -- in which the Sheen character (Capt. Willard) witnesses the helicopter attack on the VC village led by Duvall's crazy, surfing Lt. Colonel Killgore. So we have great, absurd scenes like the use of PA systems on the attacking choppers that play "Ride of the Valkyries" and Col. Kilgore ordering his two surfer troopers to surf the particularly tubular wave intersection off the coast of the village, even while the shooting is still going on. And we get great lines from Duvall like "Charlie don't surf!" But this part is a different, and inconsistent movie from the rest.

The second problem has to do with Milius and Coppola's violation of one of the basic rules of screenplay writing, as stated by the screenplay writing expert in "Adaptation" currently running in theaters with Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep: "don't use narration!" The rule, really is: "make narration a part of the story." There are lots of examples of this in written literature -- "Moby Dick" and most of Edgar Allan Poe's "confessional" short stories come to mind. In these, the narrator is a character in the drama being told; and the reader evaluates that narration with some ironic distance, just as he evaluates the statements made by all of the characters; he doesn't just take it at face value.

But here is where "Apocalypse" misses the boat, so to speak and where somebody should have gone back and re-read the Conrad novella. The Sheen character (Capt. Willard) should be the moral center of the drama -- of course having him cast as a US Army assassin is just another example of where Milius/Coppola's antiwar message screws up the film; much better if Capt. Willard had lead a team of MPs to go up the river to arrrest Col. Kurtz (the Brando character). Then, the narration would be a retrospective by Capt. Willard (like Ishmael's telling of the Moby Dick story) of the whole experience and the story would be one of Capt. Willard's gradual transformation from straight-arrow, by-the-book US Army officer as his men get shot one-by-one to the person who decides at the end to assassinate Col. Kurtz, not to arrest him. Then the real story would be how both Kurtz and Willard fell into the same trap -- submitted to what Conrad's narrator in "Heart of Darkness" called "the Destructive Element." Among other things, that still would be a profoundly anti-war message and a profoundly anti-Vietnam War message.

As it is, however, Willard is not much different than Kurtz -- he's a monster carrying out specific orders; Kurtz is a monster filling in the blanks in some very general order that he believes he has to kill VC. So, Willard cannot supply a moral reference for the film. He cannot answer the question as to why Kurtz went off the deep end; because, in Willard's frame of reference, Kurtz isn't even off the deep end. I mean, if you're an assassin, how can you object to someone else being an assassin, too, as long as he's on your side? Hell we don't even know why Willard got himself into the assassin business; why should we be interested in his analysis of where Kurtz went "around the bend"?

So what you have left is nothing but one man's (Coppola's) dramatization of his view of the US Military as a bunch of monsters (or, at least, a bunch of guys lead by monsters above the rank of lieutenant). That says more about Hollywood's views of the US Army ca. the late 1970s than anything else. For people who care about those views or who hold them, "AN!" is a good movie.

But eventually the people who care about that will be gone. And those who come after, who have no "investment" in the phenomenon known as the "Vietnam War" (in the US and abroad) will wonder what the fuss was about with this film.

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Kimber Kable

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