Robert Duvall’s sensational performance as the surf-lovin’, bomb-droppin’ Col. Extended scenes on the patrol boat draw us closer to Willard, Chief (the great Albert Hall), Chef (Frederic Forrest), the surfer Lance (Sam Bottoms) and the ghetto-raised Clean, played by a fourteen-year-old Laurence Fishburne. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), the film moves with less velocity but, oddly, with a greater sense of purpose. Willard (Martin Sheen) begins his trip up river to Cambodia to “terminate with extreme prejudice” the mad renegade Col. But the journey, laid out in the script by Coppola and John Milius, is much better mapped now. This is the untamed Apocalypse that Coppola envisioned in 1979 before money and mental pressures made him fear he had created something too long, too weird and too morally demanding for the masses.Ĭourse, the film is still chaos, and as such it’s an apt reflection of the war it depicts. It’s not the usual hustle to cadge bucks from a rerelease and future video and DVD sales (think of the recent scam with The Exorcist). Coppola and editor Walter Murch have remixed the film from original raw footage, restored forty-nine minutes (the running time now clocks in at three hours and sixteen minutes) and tacked on a new title: Apocalypse Now Redux. It still counts, though, because this Vietnam epic is not the same movie the public saw back then. This sorry-ass movie year finally coughs up a masterpiece - Francis Ford Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now - and it turns out the damn thing was first released in 1979.
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