Laurence fishburne apocalypse now7/1/2023 ![]() ![]() "Apocalypse Now" strings together one after another, with the river journey as the connecting link. Most films are lucky to contain a single great sequence. In any event, seen again now at a distance of 20 years, "Apocalypse Now" is more clearly than ever one of the key films of the century. In the 20th anniversary DVD release, Coppola patiently explains all of this once again. Alas, confusion about the endings spread from Cannes into movie folklore, and most people thought that by "ending" he meant all of the material involving Kurtz. He decided to use this footage over his closing 35mm credits, even though (this is crucial) he did not intend the destruction of the compound as an alternative "ending" to the film. After he was finished filming on the huge set of the Kurtz compound, Coppola was required by the Philippine government to destroy it, and he photographed it being blown up. But the 35mm release would need end titles. Coppola originally intended to show the movie as a 70mm roadshow with no credits (they would be printed in a booklet). Why has "Apocalypse Now" been so long bedeviled by rumors that Coppola was not happy with this ending? At the film's premiere at Cannes, I saw the confusion begin. I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floor of a silent sea." The photographer is the guide, the clown, the fool, providing the balance between Willard and Kurtz. He blathers to Willard that Kurtz is "a poet-warrior in the classic sense" and "we're all his children." In the photographer's spaced-out ravings we hear disconnected snatches of the poetry he must have heard Kurtz reciting: If you can keep your head when all about you. Eliot's despairing "The Hollow Men." That voice sets the final tone of the film.Īnother crucial element in the ending is the photojournalist ( Dennis Hopper) who has somehow found Kurtz's camp and stayed there, stoned, as a witness. ![]() When the film was released in 1979, his casting was criticized and his enormous paycheck of $1 million was much discussed, but it's clear he was the correct choice, not only because of his stature as an icon, but because of his voice, which enters the film from darkness or half-light, repeating the words of T.S. The river journey creates enormous anticipation about Kurtz, and Brando fulfills it. The film has one of the most haunting endings in cinema, a poetic evocation of what Kurtz has discovered, and what we hope not to discover for ourselves. The whole movie is a journey toward Willard's understanding of how Kurtz, one of the Army's best soldiers, penetrated the reality of war to such a depth that he could not look any longer without madness and despair. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment." This is the "horror" that Kurtz has found, and it threatens to envelop Willard, too. If I had 10 divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. They have the strength, the strength to do that. What Kurtz learned is that the Viet Cong were willing to go to greater lengths to win: "Then I realized they were stronger than we. There they were in a pile, a pile of little arms." We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. He tells Willard about a day when his Special Forces men inoculated the children of a village against polio: "This old man came running after us and he was crying, he couldn't see. Kurtz is a decorated hero, one of the best soldiers in the Army, who has created a jungle sanctuary upriver inside enemy territory, and rules Montagnard tribesmen as his private army. Willard ( Martin Sheen) about "the horror." And in such a mood I watched "Apocalypse Now" and came to the scene where Col. But I was deeply shaken by what I saw, and realized how precious and precarious is a happy life. I do not mean to equate the misery of those hopeless people with a movie that would be indecent. ![]() A week ago I was in Calcutta, where I saw mile upon square mile of squatter camps in which hundreds of thousands live generation after generation in leaky huts of plastic, cardboard and scrap metal, in poverty so absolute it is impossible to see any hope of escape. ![]()
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