The following notes on Apocalypse Now were written by Garrett Strpko, PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication Arts. The original 1979 “Roadshow” release version of Apocalypse Now will screen in a 4K DCP at the Cinematheque on Friday, September 12 at 7 p.m. Admission is free and each attendee will receive a reproduction of the original program booklet. The screening location is 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue.
By Garrett Strpko
Few films have defined the collective memory of the Vietnam War in the United States more than Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979). The movie follows Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen), a special operative in Vietnam who is tasked with a secret mission to assassinate Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a rogue officer who has taken command of his own band of indigenous warriors deep in the jungle. Rendered in a nightmarish, occasionally psychedelic, and often psychotic mood, Willard’s odyssey takes him through a cavalcade of images and sounds of the American War in Vietnam.
When the film premiered at Cannes in 1979, Francis Ford Coppola infamously pronounced that Apocalypse Now was not “about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.” On the one hand, the filmmaker’s comment seems to refer to the sheer overwhelming scale of the film. It is the definitive epic of the New Hollywood era, packed to the brim with detailed, enormous sets, vast quantities of extras, and a battalion’s worth of helicopters, jets, and patrol boats, all accentuated by an overpowering sound design and mix from renowned editor Walter Murch. Thus, Apocalypse Now ‘is’ the Vietnam War in at least the sense that it does as good a job as any film could hope of communicating the sheer scale and force of warfare.
On the other hand—and more to Coppola’s point—these conditions of production themselves mirror the destructive hubris which defined America’s involvement in Vietnam, which had come to its end less than a year before the movie entered production. As the director stated, “We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.” The production’s challenges are now nothing less than the stuff of filmmaking legend. Lead actor Martin Sheen faced several medical crises, including a heart attack, which required him to temporarily leave filming. Brando appeared on set underprepared and overweight. Location shooting in the Philippines proved especially difficult when the military equipment loaned to the production was re-requisitioned by the government for use in the Philippine Civil War. The late Eleanor Coppola, Francis’ spouse, captured these struggles and the ‘insanity’ they produced in her 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (screening at Cinematheque on Friday, September 19). If such challenges drove the filmmakers insane, the actions pursuant to that insanity are morally troubling. Like the Vietnam War, the production exhausted a harsh toll on the land. Pyrotechnics re-creating napalm explosions damaged jungles. Pursuing his vision at any cost, Coppola often resorted to dubious solutions for problems of mise-en-scène. A grave robber was hired to provide real dead bodies to litter the set of Col. Kurtz’s compound. A scene near the end portrays a heavily fictionalized ritualistic sacrifice of a water buffalo, for which a real animal was killed on camera. Apocalypse Now can be seen as a microcosm of the Vietnam War not only in its scale and challenges but also in how these challenges seemed to lead to increasingly disturbing ‘solutions’ in the name of the filmmakers’ vision.
Apocalypse Now’s final form is likewise very much the result of the peculiarly massive resources afforded to filmmakers by the late 1970s, when financial successes such as Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) encouraged studios to bankroll prestige-oriented films from auteur directors. Though the fiscal sinkhole of Apocalypse Now would eventually translate into box office success, its associated riskiness and production issues contributed to the end of the New Hollywood period. When Michael Cimino’s similarly expensive Western Heaven’s Gate premiered in 1980, a year after Apocalypse Now, it was a flop, and studios turned more toward the type of franchise-friendly fare which had been advanced by Coppola’s colleagues Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
Despite its gargantuan scale, Apocalypse Now was actually conceived as a humbler project. The idea first came to screenwriter John Milius when it was brought to his attention by a professor that nearly all the canonical works of English-language literature had been successfully adapted to film, except one: Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. Milius reasoned that perhaps the failure of existing adaptations was due to the perceived irrelevance of European colonialism of Africa, the milieu and chief target of the book’s problematic critique, to modern audiences. He instead turned to what struck him as the moral equivalent of European colonialism: the then-ongoing American war in Vietnam. As drafts were written and the careers of himself and his ‘movie-brat’ compatriots flourished, Apocalypse Now seems to have been constantly in development for potential production. At one point, Lucas was set to direct, planning to shoot on 16mm with a small-scale, documentary-like approach to the film. Yet when the screenplay finally entered production at the height of New Hollywood vision and excess, it was poised to eschew a realistic story of boots on the ground (an approach that many other Hollywood Vietnam War films, such as 1986’s Platoon, would adopt), favoring instead the psychedelic epic viewers see today.
While Milius’ change in setting does exhibit a critical eye toward the American military’s involvement in Southeast Asia, it should not obscure his fascination with the Vietnam War. Milius has unashamedly admitted his self-regret for not fighting in the war, and his script reflects a captivation with military equipment, language, and protocol as much as it expresses a cynicism about military leadership and the purported goals of waging war in Vietnam. If it is true that Apocalypse Now ‘is’ the Vietnam War, it is so in the sense that it, like America’s involvement in the war, it is fundamentally contradictory. It is a massive, hugely successful production which was nonetheless rife with challenges and contributed to the end of the auteur-centric period it emerged in. It expresses concern toward American military involvement in Vietnam and the plight of the country’s people in that period, while also exhibiting a fascination with military aesthetics and recapitulating troubling colonialist ideas from its source material. Milius, Coppola, and other filmmakers involved in the film have long contended that they did not make an anti-war movie, but an anti-lie movie. Perhaps in the way that Apocalypse Now and its production exhibit such stark contradictions, the filmmakers expose this history—and achieve their ambitions.