The last time I covered Apocalypse Now, I largely focused on just how surreal and odd the whole thing was. Set in the Vietnam War, filmed not long after it ended, this is a film where what should be a standard military sort of story is anything but. Based as it is on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, this is a film where Air Cav officers decide to take a beach for the surfing, what looks like a Catholic Mass is held in the middle of a war zone, cows get airlifted away, and terrified villagers are ushered into a landing craft all while being told that the Americans destroying their village are there to protect them. And this is just one moment in the film. It’s not a film that could ever be mistaken for a conventional war film.
That might actually make it more accurate in a weird sort of way.
War films have a certain type of history. For most of the history of American cinema, the war film with the occasional exception (All Quiet on the Western Front comes to mind), always seemed to me to be very black-and-white, showing the band of brothers coming together to beat a faceless, often unrepentantly evil enemy. More modern war films may be more inclined to show the horrors and dehumanization of war. But aside from another Vietnam-set film, Platoon, I can’t think of any war film that treats war as this bizarre and unreal a situation, and I would be inclined to argue that the crazy elements of Platoon come more from director Oliver Stone’s unsubtle and gonzo directorial style. Francis Ford Coppola is, in my mind, both a much better director than Stone and also not one whose work tends to go this way. There’s nothing else in Coppola’s filmography that I can think of that comes close to the outright insanity that is Apocalypse Now.
Consider, if you will, Captain Willard’s (Martin Sheen) mission: go up a river to Cambodia, find the rogue Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), and kill him. Kurtz’s crime is actually winning the war. He’s just going about it in a manner that is more brutal and violent than American leadership is comfortable with. Plus, he seems to be building a cult of some kind in the middle of the jungle. Kurtz was already brilliant and eccentric before all this happened, and that doesn’t even include how overweight the man was, but that had more to do with the fact Brando showed up on set after gaining far too much weight to credibly play a commando, leading to Coppola’s decision to shoot Brando in shadows to hide his bulk, a method that almost works. Almost.
And if that wasn’t enough, Willard is going to encounter all kinds of surreal sights, starting with Air Cav Lt. Col. William Killgore, the most appropriately named character in the entire film. As played by Robert Duvall, Killgore might be the one character in the film that rivals Kurtz for eccentric charisma, but I said something about that when I wrote this film up in 2018. Consider instead how Willard’s journey went: the most “normal” military figures Willard meets the entire trip are the four men on the Navy’s swift boat, loaned to him to get him where he needs to go without telling them where they are going and why. These four guys seem like the sort that would come out of most war films. And naturally, most of them end up dead before the film is over.
Beyond that, there’s the USO show with the Playboy Playmates (one or two of which were played by actual Playmates), the bridge under siege where neither side had a commanding officer, other swift boats tossing lit debris onto Willard’s boat, the family that gets killed when one member tries to rescue her admittedly very cute puppy (that then becomes the boat’s mascot and presumably survives the film), abandoned boats that may be booby traps, and the occasional tiger. I don’t watch the Redux version when I do these things, so my guess is there’s more senseless strangeness going on all over it as well.
It’s not particularly surprising that the only “normal” officer Willard meets during the course of his trip, Albert Hall’s Chief, captain of the swift boat, ends up dying from the lone spear tossed at the boat during an otherwise harmless barrage of arrows from local tribesmen. And oddly enough, Dennis Hopper shows up later to show the boat’s siren would have scared all those guys off anyway if the crew just blew it. Chief just wanted to follow the rules, get the job done, and go home. Killgore cares more about surfing and making the war as much like home as he can–something Willard says actually makes it seem like they are even further away from home–and Kurtz, well, he’s nuts anyway. Naturally, Chief is the one to die in combat.
However, that aforementioned line about home being more distant the more Killgore tries to make it so seems to be the theme of the film: nothing going on anywhere is like it is back home, to the point where Willard isn’t even sure he can go home. Killgore can and will order two of his men to go surfing in the middle of a firefight, something at least one of them isn’t so sure is a good idea (it isn’t), but, as Willard correctly says of the man, he’s the kind of officer who will somehow escape the worst of whatever is going on without a scratch. Contrast that with the Chief, a man who is just doing everything the way he is supposed to, and he dies. Kurtz appears to be winning the war all on his own, so he has to die. It’s not like there weren’t atrocities going on all around the film that Kurtz wasn’t involved in. Pretty much everything Killgore does looks like it might be if not a war crime then at least cruel, even a small moment where it looks like he’s going to give a dying local some water that the man is asking for when Killgore gets distracted by something surf-related and just walks away before he can give the guy a drink.
And somehow, this violent, anarchic, messy journey where death and destruction could come out at any moment feels more to me like what war might actually be like than most war films even aspire to be. I’ve never been to war, I don’t think I ever will be at my age, but somehow I suspect this may accurately reflect the psychology of war far better than most. And that’s a scary thought.
NEXT: What’s the opposite of something like Apocalypse Now? Probably something that is ultimately beautiful, family-friendly, and life affirming. Sounds like that might describe 2008’s WALL-E.
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