Extremely late to the party of course on this one. I just watched Apocalypse Now and I'm aware that I'm not going to bring anything new or original to the analysis of the content so let me just get my impression out of the way and movie on: this is an amazing movie.

Spectacle in modern film comes cheap. When I go to the movies today and see cityscapes with flying traffic, long shots of enormous crowds, famous landmarks incinerated in disaster films, or dogfights high above a besieged city, it all lacks the impact knowing that 99 percent of what I'm looking at was generated on a computer screen rather than an actual set. There is value to knowing that what we're seeing exists in some fashion even if it's a model on a table at ILM. Apocalypse Now has so many shots that are crammed with detail. Especially at the beginning of the movie there are shots with a dozen helicopters, tanks, and crowds of soldiers running through. I'd like to think that awe I felt at the spectacular undertaking it must have been to achieve those shots is an approximation of what that might feel seeing it in reality. It's a much more uniquely magical feeling than anything constructed in the digital universe.

It isn't just spectacle though. The movie is gorgeously shot. As Captain Willard's odyssey gets deeper and deeper into the jungle the movie starts to drown in ethereal smoke and vapor. I was amazed by how many times I could have paused the movie and had a beautiful still. The Redux edition has gone through a technicolor process that has created a deeply saturated look for the entire film.

The story is wonderful. Based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Willard's journey is like the gradual on-come of intoxication. The imagery in the films opening act is crisp and bright. As the characters near the end of their outward journey, a metaphor for their journey into themselves, the shots are doused in smoke and darkness. The movie is pitch perfect and though it's very long, the passaging of time was unnoticeable for me.

That is, except for the Redux addtions. The original Apocalypse Now was two hours and ten minutes long. The Redux edition features 50 minutes of restored footage which bumps the movie to just over the three hour mark. The voyage into the dark hearts of men proceeds beautifully, until at about just over halfway through there's a new addition. In the sequence the voyagers on Willard's boat come to a trashed medivac station and find the Playboy bunnies hanging out there, presumably waiting out a bad rain storm. Willard trades gasoline for time with the bunnies and what follows is a bizzare sequence where the two women babble nonsensically while men slowly and remove their clothes and pose them in positions. At one point while a soldier and one of the women are about to have sex they knock a casket off a table which falls open revealing the naked body of a soldier. Obvious symbolism aside, the scene doesn't work. The women behave so bizzarely and the dialogue is so odd that the whole thing feels haphazard and out of place compared to the silky darkness of the rest of the movie.

Later in the film, virtually right before Willard finds Kurtz, the crew of the boat run into some French colonialists. What follows is a long LONG dinner party with the Frenchman where they get into an argue about politics. Willard then gets high with one of the women who tells him he has two side: one that loves and one that hates. This far into the film it was as though the little boat I'd come to feel like a passenger on hit an iceberg. And that iceberg was France. All the forward momentum and intoxication of the narrative is almost wrecked on it's shores. The journey, which up until this point has occurred through symbolism and action bogs down in this talky expository mess. A story as epic as this can't be ruined by two scenes but it certainly made me wish I'd seen the movie without them. Eventually the crew climbs back into their boat and finishes the journey, finding Colonel Kurtz (an already swelling Marlon Brando) and their destiny.

I tried comparing Apocalypse Now to the other war films I've seen but the difficulty is (and the mistaken assumption I believe lead to reinserting the French sequence) that I don't really believe Apocalypse Now is a war film. If so, unlike other war films, the fact that it is is incidental. What matters is it's one of the most well assembled, completely engrossing stories about the darker facets of man's inner natures and could have occurred at any point in history. Definitely one of my favorite films.