Delayed Reaction: Apocalypse Now

The Pitch: It's time that people know about Vietnam...again.

When it comes to movies, one way you can define influence is being able to watch a movie for the first time and feeling like you've seen it before. Film is a medium that builds off what's been done before. Almost nothing is actually new. Most films are just a new concoction with familiar ingredients. I say this because I'd never seen Apocalypse Now until the other day, but my brain couldn't be convinced of that. Everything about that movie was familiar. I've internalized so many references to the movie that I don't specifically remember any one thing I've seen that references back to it. It's not like watching the Master of None episode "The Thief" then recognizing what it pulled from The Bicycle Thief when I watched that or seeing My Dinner With Andre after "My Dinner with Abed". I'm sure I've seen direct parodies of Apocalypse Now without even realizing it at the time, but it's the collection of smaller beats too that seemed familiar. More than "I love the smell of napalm in the morning".

Speaking of that scene though, I think it's a great capper to an impressive sequence. What made it especially impressive is the mix of the scope of the battle scene, the futility of the attack, and the senseless overkill of doing it essentially for the surfing opportunities.

This is a terrifically-made movie. If I liked it just a little more, I'd be tempted to track down Apocalypse Now Redux, which includes even more footage that didn't make it into the original cut. I liked the film more in moments than for the story as a whole. Martin Sheen impressively holds this together at the center, while supporting performances from Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Albert Hall, and others populate the world nicely. The cinematography is stunning. If only all troubled film productions could result in something this impressive. That would be nice.

While this was better than I expected, I still mostly saw it to give context for when I inevitably seen Heart of Darkness. Apocalypse Now is the best case scenario of the bloated productions the became emblematic of that era. It's still a troubled production and the end result feels pretty scattered. Or maybe I've just had my fill of Vietnam movies already, so this felt like more of the same rather than something unique.

As a side thought, is there any director who has had as solid a decade of work as Francis Ford Coppola in the 1970s? The Godfather 1 and 2, TheConversation, and Apocalypse Now. Maybe Spielberg 1975-1984 (Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Twilight Zone: The Movie, Temple of Doom), but that had a lot of lows.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend