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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The new scenes in "Apocalypse Now Redux" bring a hellish clarity to the appalling vision of Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece.
Aug 4, 2001 | According to the documentary "Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures," Kubrick used to say that he'd string together a few good scenes and in the end he'd come out with a movie. You can see that formula in Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now." Or at least that's the way I remembered it.
First, there's Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) doing drunken Kung Fu in his Saigon hotel room. Then there's a dozen or so helicopters in attack formation and Lt. Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall) strutting along a beach, checking out the waves, oblivious to the mortar shells exploding at his boots. Then come the Playboy bunnies prancing across stage. Next parachute flares and tracer fire light up the night sky at a devastated bridge. And then we finally meet creepy Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in his riverfront death palace. "The End." The end. Credits.
But watching the newly restored "Apocalypse Now Redux," which features new scenes and nearly an hour of additional material cut from the first version, reminded me that the film is far more than just a string of jewels. There's a narrative wire that connects each of the movie's precious baubles, a force pulling Willard and his boat upstream to their deadly rendezvous with Colonel Kurtz. And the dialogue and the narration -- all those great lines about "napalm in the morning" and "handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500" -- are the brilliant light glinting off the facets.
The most important thing about the most recent version of the film -- the third, as far as I can tell -- is that it's in theaters, playing on huge screens with booming sound systems. The movie is so big and so nuanced in its druggy delirium that it gets lost on a television, especially without a widescreen aspect ratio.
The second most important thing is that Coppola and his editor, Walter Murch, have restored, re-edited and remixed the entire film. The new print looks great; save a short scene with a bunch of dust flecks about two-thirds of the way in, it was flawless. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's daylight skies are oddly yellowish, and the jungle scenes are a sort of muted green. This Vietnam isn't a lush tropical paradise. The most vibrant, saturated colors you see are in blood and fire.
The bait luring moviegoers back into the theaters, 22 years after the movie was released in 1979, is several scenes that were cut from the first print of the movie. There are two entirely new scenes: the other additions are material previously left off the end of scenes or cut out of transitions. And in one place a scene was cut from the original and placed further along in the story.
For the most part, the new material brings Coppola's sometimes murky, sometimes crystalline vision into clearer focus. (If you haven't seen the new version yet, be aware that the remainder of this review contains several spoilers.) Except for the absence of the scene where Lance (Sam Bottoms) water-skies behind the boat and Clean (Larry Fishburne) hips out to "Satisfaction" (it's added later, after the USO show), the new movie plays scene-for-scene exactly as the original until the end of Kilgore's famed Air Calvary helicopter raid. The helicopter scene is still every bit as spectacular as the original, with all those gunships zooming in on a well-guarded beachfront. It's a thrilling sequence that manages to pump you up on Kilgore's bravado and then slam your head into the armrest when the movie closes in on the real human devastation that the attack wreaks.
Kilgore, remember, is in charge of escorting Willard through the Delta. Instead of taking an easier route, he chooses a well-protected point because there's an offshore break and he wants to watch Lance, a famous surfer accompanying Willard upriver, ride the waves. The raid is fast and devastating. Kilgore loses three helicopters and several men to the effort. "If that's how Kilgore fought the war," says Willard, "I was beginning to wonder what they had against Kurtz."
