Apocalypse Now (1979)

Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Writers: John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola
Stars: Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall
Runtime: 153 minutes    

Plot: During the Vietnam War, Captain Willard is sent on a dangerous mission into Cambodia to assassinate a renegade colonel who has set himself up as a god among a local tribe.

Review: Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now lives up to its grand title, disclosing not only the various faces of war but also the contradictions between excitement and boredom, terror and pity, brutality and beauty. Its epiphanies would do credit to Federico Fellini, who is indirectly quoted at one point.

The major part of the film is occupied with Willard's adventures as he travels in a small patrol boat provided by the Army. These sequences are often spellbinding, none more so than one in which Willard and his companions are forced to observe an assault on a Vietcong village by American fighter planes and helicopters. With the exception of Mr. Brando, who has no role to act, the actors are superlatively right, beginning with Mr. Duvall and Mr. Sheen, and including Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Larry Fishburne, and Sam Bottoms, who play the members of the patrol boat's crew. Vittorio Storaro, who photographed Last Tango in Paris, among other fine films, is responsible for the extraordinary camerawork that almost, but not quite, saves Apocalypse Now from its profoundly anticlimactic intellectual muddle.

Reviewed by Mohaiminul Islam