On "Apocalypse Now"

SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE AND DON'T WANT IMPORTANT ELEMENTS OF THE PLOT REVEALED TO YOU DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER.

I decided to put in Apocalypse Now tonight because it's one of those movies all young men have to see, and we're doing the Vietnam unit so I figured it was relevant to class.

The movie is a work of art. It goes beyond a normal war film. Many war films do have some deeper meaning linked to them, but this one is just loaded with the deeper meanings, and for a movie that's thirty years old, the special effects are wonderful. This easily makes my list of top 10 best movies I've seen. With a cast so star-studded that Harrison Ford, Jon Voight, and Laurence Fishburne play minor roles, how could it not be?

Multiple themes and motifs emerged as I watched it. The main ones I spotted and will focus on were noise and the degradation of morals and civilization towards Hell.

First the noise: I noticed this even in class when we watched the scene involving the 1st of the 9th Brigade. Throughout the entire movie, there was all sorts of back ground noise that tells me the director is trying to overwhelm the viewer. During the early parts of the movie, there were helicopters everywhere; towards the middle, shots and flares were all over; by the end, it was just strange music. The music actually showed up often, and it creeped me out. The music described by Mitchell Sanders in The Things They Carried definitely seemed to be being played in the background of Apocalypse Now. I think the goal of overwhelming the viewer was a way to make the war even more real. It begins to wear on you and it actually takes a physical and emotional toll after about an hour, making the movie hellish.

The decay in humanity that was portrayed in the movie certainly goes along with the title and was certainly a purposeful method of embodying the immorality of the Vietnam War and war in general. The movie begins in Saigon with the main character, Captain Willard, drunk and in poor spirits, utterly depressed. This is shows a personal decay.

During the scene we watched in class, the colonel played by Robert Duvall is just nuts. He's got his crap together and is actually an excellent officer, but he's freaking crazy! A bad-ass, but crazy! This scene does a good job of showing an eccentric stage on the trail to insanity.

As Willard progresses on his journey with a crew of four on a small PT boat, they come across a few army outposts. At the first, the scene is a bit of a sensory overload, but then again the whole movie is. Starvation and desire for America and the licentiousness of America is portrayed at this outpost. The 500+ some troops at the outpost are treated to a USO show featuring Hugh Hefner and the best of the Playmates. Things get out of hand when the girls are dancing as the young soldiers have a hard time containing their lust. Nothing too much happens, but the message that they are being starved and are losing conscience is clear.

The next outpost they come across is not nearly as civilized. The soldiers can't even name their commanding officer and bombs, flares, and shots go everywhere. As the boat pulls through the river, soldiers swim after it crying "Take me home! Get me the #$%^ out of here!" It's absolutely shocking to watch. The horrors of this scene make it seem like a living Hell. The scene is filmed at night and only the erratic spurts of muzzle light and flares light the scene. As a viewer, I was rendered speechless and thoughtless. I could only think, "how terrible." When it was emphasized multiple times that there was no CO, it became clear that the reason this scene was there was to emphasize the incompetency of the American commanders and FUBAR situations that occured. I wondered if it could get worse.

As the boat proceeded down the river into Cambodia, they did. When Willard finally got to his destination, the true Hell became apparent. Dead, mangled bodies were everywhere yet there were hundreds of people to care for them and do something about it. The colonel Willard was instructed to kill, played by Marlon Brando, is a heck of a character. There are many strange people in the movie, but he is just insane. As you learn more about the character in the final scenes of the movie, you realize he seems to believe he's not taken steps backward on the continuum of humanity, but has transcended it. Early in the movie, you learn that this colonel, Colonel Kurtz, is a very intelligent and ambitious man but has gone renegade and likely insane. He has come to be a complete autocrat, a demigod more, of a tribe of native Cambodians. Having only watched the movie once and not being a psychology or sociology buff, I don't have much to say except that I was absolutely stunned by the Hell he created.

Besides "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," there are tons of great lines in the movie. Some are just a bit too corny, though. The narration seems to offer tons of cliches like "Oh man, the bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam you needed wings to stay above it. " or "charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500." There was one that stood out as particularly meaningful to the plot, though. "We had reached the end of the river." This just made it obvious that the brink between sanity and insanity had been reached and it was further than anyone thought.

Before I close, there's one more thing I'd like to bring up. The idea of truth and true war stories. We've seen this mentioned in TTTC, but I definitely seems to spread to other Vietnam media as well. If someone tried to tell me that Apocalypse Now actually happened, I would refer them to a doctor. The movie is wacked-out, man! Just FUBAR. Then again, maybe that's why it could be true.

Without seeing Apocalypse Now, there's no way you could ever understand it. It's so powerful and so provoking that it would take three or four viewings to really get it. These are only half of the reactions I got from it in one viewing. I don't think I'm going to sleep tonight...half because I'm thinking about the depth of the movie, half because it scares me a bit too.