Festival de Cannes: Apocalypse Now (1979)

In 1979, a shockwave went across the movie world upon the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s war movie, Apocalypse Now. Though it won the top prize at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, the film’s controversial premiere at the festival ended up keeping it shrouded in critical disagreement. Now, 41 years later, the film remains one of the most searing pieces of cinema ever created.

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The deeper you go, the more you realize the lies you’ve been told. That’s the fear – that things are not as they seem. That you’ve tied yourself to a reality that isn’t real. That the real thing is much darker and full of horror.  

Apocalypse Now may not be a horror film in the strict sense of how we perceive that genre, but it is undoubtedly a film about horror. Its iconic closing lines aside, this film brings horror with it from the very opening. Those soft guitar sounds of “The End” by The Doors mix with the muffled sounds of helicopter blades. A hallucinogenic mixture of smoke billows up. We see a tropical vista of exotic trees along a river. For those brief early moments, it may look safe, but even then, it doesn’t feel safe. Then the music kicks in and that visceral explosion of napalm fills the screen. This is no tropical vista. The smoke rising from the bottom of the frame should have given it away. Now the words of the song seal it. This is the end. We are in hell on earth. 

This is the end, beautiful friend 

This is the end, my only friend – the end 

Of our elaborate plans – the end 

Of everything that stands – the end 

No safety or surprise – the end 

I’ll never look into your eyes, again 

Those lines of “The End” are an example of just how perfectly this film calibrates its mood. It does this through the music here, but what makes it one of the all-time great films is that it is able to do this through images. This is a testament to the work of director Francis Ford Coppola, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, and the writing by Coppola, John Milius, and Michael Herr. In the opening scene, they join to create something both beautiful and, at the same time, incredibly haunting. 

That opening might just be the greatest opening scene in movie history. Some openers use dialogue or grand set pieces to prepare us for the story. Some use a perfectly calibrated character introduction or multiple introductions to give us the players that will bring the story to life. This one doesn’t have any dialogue. And, though we do meet Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen), he isn’t given a typical introduction. We learn about his character – that much is sure. But it happens through images, and this is the greatness of the opening scene. It sets a mood and it gives us the information we need to process the story entirely through the incredible images we see. This is filmmaking at its finest – a perfect mastery of the visual art form. 

The sound of helicopter blades drops us right into the middle of the Vietnam War – Saigon. Captain Willard is “waiting for a mission.” Watching this in the waning years of my twenties, I resonated with the idea of realizing your life still lies ahead of you with the opportunity to make an impact on the world around you – to do something of importance. You want to be given that mission. Willard is finally given his. After being called to command at Nha Trang, he is told about a general who has seemingly gone insane. His methods have become “unsound.” Willard’s mission is to go deep into the jungles of Cambodia and terminate this general with “extreme prejudice.” The general’s name is Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), and his name will hover in Willard’s consciousness for the remainder of the film. 

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At this point, one must mention the incredible performance of Martin Sheen that is the heart of the film. In a decade filled with performances that have been lauded as some of the greatest in movie history, Sheen is every bit as virtuosic as his counterparts in the 70’s. I would contend that Sheen does not get enough credit for his work in this film. Coppola and Brando are incredible. Storaro’s cinematography is some of the best that has ever been committed to film. And yet, it wouldn’t come together without this career-defining performance from Sheen. 

Sheen was wrestling with his own personal demons, and the opening scene was his own way of exorcising them. He cut his hand while filming the scene when he punches the mirror and told Coppola to continue filming anyways. It’s one of those mythic Hollywood stories, except this one is completely true. 

It will never cease to amaze me that this film was even made. That out of the absolute insanity of its making, something coherent was created, let alone one of the great masterpieces of movie history. So much of art is a perfect coming together of instances and moments that seem unbelievably fortuitous in hindsight. A song written about a breakup becomes the perfect opening number for a war film, for instance. It seems too wild to have happened, and yet it did. How could Coppola push through the weather, the destruction of sets, the sickness, and all the rest to make this movie? It will forever be one of the great wonders of movie history. 

So, what of the movie’s plot? Yes, it is loosely based upon Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. As with any story with a “journey” plot, it is also inspired by Homer’s Odyssey. Willard is accompanied on this journey by “Chef” (Frederic Forrest), Lance (Sam Bottoms), “Clean” (an early Laurence Fishburne performance), and Chief Phillips (Albert Hall). Only Willard knows the mission they’re undertaking. The rest just know their going up the river. The mission was given by military men that passed judgments and told Willard what the reality was – Kurtz has gone too far and must be stopped. But quickly, Willard begins to wonder what “too far” even means in this war. Who gets the right to be an accuser when death is around every corner? Who among them is blameless? 

In this way, the film bears resemblance to another Coppola masterpiece – The Godfather. Both films plumb the depths of human nature. They both involve the main character’s journey of becoming the evil they begin by denouncing. Willard begins as a military man, though a broken one. But the deeper he goes into the jungle, he begins to realize he isn’t “even in their…army anymore.” This begins when he meets Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall). 

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Kilgore loves to surf. That’s great, because Lance is a famous surfer. Kilgore has disdain for the Vietnamese because “Charlie don’t surf.” Willard needs Kilgore to get them to their entry point up the river. This involves a helicopter invasion that brings one of the film’s great scenes as the helicopters blast Wagner before they bear down upon a village. That scene is a distillation of the film’s pathos. The music begins to swell as the helicopters swoop down. The visuals give you this rousing feeling and then you are immediately jolted by images of death and destruction. It’s horrific. And the true horror is that you were even roused by the scene in the first place. 

They are still being fired upon when Kilgore decides to start surfing anyways. This is the scene that brings the film’s famous line from Kilgore – “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Personally, I prefer two lines that come after that one. Duvall gives a perfect delivery when he says that the napalm “smelled like…victory.” Then he says, “Someday, this war’s gonna end.” The way he delivers these lines is chilling. Willard clearly begins to wonder whether Kurtz can be any crazier than this display. 

And that’s just it. The military applauds Kilgore yet they want Kurtz dead. This is where Willard begins to break with himself. The rifts are clear and they grow ever wider as the boat goes deeper into the jungle. 

Apocalypse Now is a difficult film. I’ll make no distinction about the fact that I think it is one of the great films ever made, but that doesn’t mean it is without its questionable elements. A few years back, I read The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016. In the novel, Nguyen parodies the making of Apocalypse Now to show how the film treats the native Vietnamese as complete plot devices worthy only of killing. One scene, in particular, is especially jarring when a Vietnamese family in a sampan are viciously killed when Clean mistakenly thinks a woman is reaching for a gun. 

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I would contend that the film depicts the scene precisely for its blatant inhumanity. We are to acknowledge that the Vietnamese are humans worthy of respect and far better treatment. But the film clearly does not give much of a Vietnamese point of view on the war. The only moment where you might be able to say that it does is just before the helicopter attack when we see a Vietnamese village in quiet daily life before the sirens begin. I often go back to Roger Ebert’s adage that It is not so important what a film is about as how it is about it. My opinion is that Apocalypse Now is a film about the horrors of war and the complete shredding of morality that must occur in the depths of war. How it goes about that is by depicting that shredding on screen for us to see. It is dark, it is horrific, and yet I think there’s something truthful at its core.

I say all that because I think Nguyen’s critique is an important one for modern engagement with this film. Wars force us to take sides and to the see the “other” as the enemy. But this is not how things should be. This is not reality as it should be. And we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be tricked into that kind of division.

Willard is divided, and by the time he finally reaches Kurtz, he doesn’t even know what to believe anymore. With such an incredible buildup, you would think that the reveal of Kurtz would not live up to the hype. How could a performance possibly live up to the buildup that this film gives him. Well, that’s why you bring in Marlon Brando. Despite coming to the set incredibly overweight and not having even read the source material, Coppola and Storraro were able to figure out a way to coax this performance out of possibly the greatest actor to ever live. His lines in the film (written by John Milius in one of the great screenplays ever written) are larger than life. Most actors would turn them into overwrought sideshows. Brando gives each line exactly what it needs. As Storraro keeps him shrouded in darkness, Kurtz laments that Willard is only “an errand boy sent by grocery clerks.”

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On this rewatch, I was struck by the amount of time that passes from when Willard reaches Kurtz’s compound to the end of the film. You realize that, after this arduous journey, Willard is just wasting away. Kurtz is toying with him. Finally, after seeing the rest of his crew die one way or another, Willard is done. Kurtz is asking for it at this point. Willard completes his mission in one of the most disturbing and affecting scenes of movie violence you will ever see. 

Here, again, is a scene where the film has been met with controversy. Coppola filmed a real bull being killed in the sacrificial ceremony. Was this necessary? Of course not. I’m all for realism in film and going the extra mile to get details right. But the effect could have been created without killing a real animal. Coppola was met with similar criticism for the horse’s head scene in The Godfather. Both scenes are disturbing. I would think that disturbing effect could be realized without using the real thing, but maybe Mr. Coppola would disagree on that.

In any case, Apocalypse Now is a great film precisely because it horrifies us. Should it get a pass for its controversial elements because of this? No. And yet I think there’s something to be said about holding the film’s imperfections in concert with the fact that it is attempting to tell the truth about human imperfection at its most visceral level. How can we do these things to one another? What must one do to themselves to be able to commit these acts of violence against another human being? What does it say about any one of us that we bear the same humanity that can bring out these acts in other human beings? Is that darkness in each one of us? 

Is it?

This film seems to think so. That’s the horror of which Kurtz speaks with his dying breath. Those are the horrors he’s seen when he speaks of the “pile of little arms.” These are human beings doing this to other human beings. On some level, this is a stain that all of us who make up humanity share.

The horror. The horror.