![]() Even if that isn't the reason, I am now among the converted: Apocalypse Now seems to me a stunning work of art, not a picture flailing for a point of view but a picture whose point of view belongs to a flailing man, a flailing era. I hope I'm a little wiser and a little more clued-in about what I'm doing as a moviegoer. So I hardly think that the extra 45 minutes that Coppola has inserted for what is now touted as Apocalypse Now Redux are the reason for the massive about-face in my response to the film. During the years while the implications of that fact sunk in, I haven't seen Apocalypse Now again those years, of course, have also profited me a great deal in reformulating the goals of art, the role played by "structure" and "order," and the problems with a critical viewpoint that mostly favors neatly packaged texts over their sprawling, unruly counterparts. The vagaries of my grasp of Conrad are hardly the issue here as a reader of this site alerted me in an e-mail in 1998, with great truculence but valuable perception, one does not watch movies because they are like books. The movie reached me as an ambitious failure, an aggregate of jaw-dropping images that finally had no answers to its own questions and no definable source for its palpable grief and outrage. ![]() It boggled my mind that the actual heart of darkness was no darker than what preceded it. ![]() Didn't Coppola understand that starting the river journey at such a high pitch of delirium as he achieves in the Kilgore sequence-and achieves is certainly the word for that astonishing interval-is bound nonetheless to mute the impact of what comes after? It abraded my sense of How Things Should Be that the climactic sequence at Kurtz's compound felt so disconnected, not just from the movie but, in so many much-discussed ways, even disconnected from itself. I saw Apocalypse Now for the first time when I was a junior English major in college, and I was at that time-and probably for that reason-appalled that a reputed adaptation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness had botched such major axioms of the novella. Screenplay: John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola (based on the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad). Spradlin, Harrison Ford, Aurore Clément, Christian Marquand, Scott Glenn, Cynthia Wood, Colleen Camp. Cast: Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Sam Bottoms, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Larry Fishburne, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, G.D.
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