I just did a rewatch of the 4k 'final cut' restoration of the film not that long ago. I read "Heart of Darkness" in Highschool and my english teacher petitioned the school for months trying to get approval to have us watch Apocalypse Now and she could never get them to do it. Watching it the first time: I realized why my teacher was so desperate for us to see it.
Straight up: I think the film is brilliant but the complete experience benefits from some context of the original story its based on, as well as some knowledge of the Iraq war. I took some special treats to heighten the experience and it really helps crystalize the feeling that the same framework of a story about British colonialism from 1800s is just as relevant set in the vietnam war, and could probably be easily palette swapped with a desert theme today. "All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again".
Also random sidenote:
Sometimes on special treats my brain likes to make really weird connections to other things. In the movie during the "charlie don't surf sequence" there's an entire segment devoted to them napalm striking a village and section of the jungle where we've clearly seen women and children playing. As the survivors are coming out of the woodwork some army official is on a megaphone screeching "Remember! Above all we are here to help! WE ARE HERE TO LIBERATE YOU!!!"
For some reason I couldn't help but think of "Mars Attacks" from Tim Burton and the sequence where the Martians first arrive and announce "We come in Peace", only to proceed to slaughter the entire gathering. There are multiple sections where something similar happens: the aliens proclaim friendly intentions only to continue the slaughter. My younger self always read that surface level as "the translation software is broken", and its totally possible I'm giving Tim Burton too much credit...but if that was his intention that's a hell of a deep cut.
Obviously an incredible cinematic achievement, but ultimately it fails in its surface promise to be an anti-war film. It's most poignant anti-war scene, or at least what it should have been, is the helicopter attack scene on the village. A line of Huey helicopters massacres an entire village of people fleeing to the epic diegetic soundtrack of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. On it's face, the scene should make one think of Nazis mowing down civilians from passing troop carriers, but instead the music overpowers the scene and it turns into a celebration of the violence one assumes the scene originally intended to condemn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30QzJKCUekQ
I think the proof is in the pudding, look at the comments and try to find someone expressing horror at the scene. Everyone's having a great time watching the village get massacred because the whole scene is edited like a Wagner music video. FFC had a choice here, he could have made a horrific scene of brutality or an epic exhilarating battle scene and he tried to be too clever by half and do both, but instead we got an exhilarating depiction of a war crime that has influenced millions of soldiers who have seen the film since.
I think Jarhead is more of an anti-war film than Apocalypse Now because it makes war look stupid, boring, randomly horrific, and overall a complete waste of everything, at the end everyone just gets a call that the war is over and they all expend their ammunition into the sky since they barely used it in combat. Jarhead has a scene depicting how soldiers react to Apocalypse Now's massacre scene and it's exactly what you'd expect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K7XfFQVMgs
A true anti-war film cannot be mixed with rock and roll and also be cool. You cannot make war cool in your anti-war film or it ceases to be an anti-war film. You can make a fun film, you can make an anti-war film, you cannot make a fun anti-war film. The greatest anti-war films of all time all treat war the same way; it's boring, senselessly cruel, and leaves everyone broken or dead. This is how it's depicted in Come and See, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of War, etc.
I agree with almost everything you said, however I would push back on using YouTube comment sections as representative of the full spectrum of audience response to a film :P
Totally agree with this, and I'd add Thin Red Line to the list of anti-war films that succeed in being anti-war.
The fact that it only showed the American/western perspective of it all felt so off-putting to me. All of the Vietnamese people in the movie didn't seem like real people, the entire point of their existence was as a prop, their suffering and deaths only mattered in how they effected the Americans. Same with the natives near the end of the movie.
But I think that was probably intentional. The movie was clearly meant to be a sort of surreal America looking back at the war sort of thing. There was even a lot of little details to allude to this, like how the DJ on the radio talks about playing classic rock/old tunes, and is playing music that would have been current at the time.
I don't believe the movie being that dumb and American was an accident or unironically how the movie was made, I think it was intentional. I think the French scenes were removed originally because they detracted from this goal, they showed an extra part of the war that isn't really part of the American memory.
I think the off-putting feeling is intentional because it is how America treats people in other countries. Just props, tools, they only matter in how they make America feel, or how they make America richer.
I feel like Platoon doesn't necessarily portray the Vietnamese Experience all that much more, just the Americans are more emotional about it. Haven't watched it in awhile tho, so maybe I'm forgetting stuff
I remember really digging it, I'll have to watch it again. I did Heart of Darkness (the book, not the Doco) for English in High School and that's terrific as well. I remember the opening is almost purposely hard to follow, but eventually it calms down.
How do we feel about translating English colonialism & slavery of Africa in 1890's to America/Vietnam wartime in 60's/70's? There's no slavery in Vietnam, and you get the feeling America is quite happy to just bomb the shit out of it rather than colonising it (Kurtz being an eccentric outlier to America's plan of destruction?
I enjoy getting really frassed and watching the full 3hr version every now and then. A sort of companion book is Dispatches by Michael Herr, who consulted on the movie IIRC.
Can you explain why the redux is worse? I think I only saw that one and they at least scratched on colonialism in the dialogue.
