The scene used to end with Kilgore on the beach, inhaling the smell of napalm. Now, we find out that the napalm attack blows out the waves. For some reason -- maybe to impress his new boatmates, maybe to piss off the Lt. Colonel -- Willard swipes Kilgore's surfboard.

That cuts to the scene where Chef goes into the jungle for mangos, which now begins with the boat crew hiding out under a leafy tree while Kilgore patrols the river searching for the board. It's a fun new bit, and it seamlessly gets us from the beach into the river, while establishing a little camaraderie among Willard and the guys who will boat him upstream. At the same time, it's a jarringly lighthearted gag to follow such a disturbing battle.

While waiting for Kilgore's patrol to pass, Chief (Albert Hall) asks Willard where they're going, and whether or not he likes hot zones. Willard doesn't answer either question. In the narration, however, he says that you "never get a chance to know who you are at some factory in Ohio."

I think that's the first clue to what Coppola is trying to do with this version of the film, and what he might have been trying to get at with "Apocalypse Now" all along. Willard is all of us, an equivocal Everyman sent up a river to find some sort of truth -- or at least an absence of lies. But to do that he must simultaneously try to find out who he is -- and who Kurtz is. He can't tell one story without the other, he says in the beginning. His quest involves an almost Shakespearean collision of dualities: good/evil, love/hate, win/lose, rational/irrational, soft/hard, friend/enemy, South Vietnamese Army/North Vietnamese Army, soldier/assassin, Willard/Kurtz.

At the end of the film, Willard is going to find out what Kurtz knows, which is that the truth exists in the middle of those dualities -- that the truth is both sides at the same time. Perhaps this means that there is no truth at all. This dark revelation comes at the end of the picture, and the biggest criticism of "Apocalypse Now," one delivered when it opened and repeated today, is that the film falls apart at the end. "Muddled" is the word most often used to explain the final scenes.

Insofar as this is true, it's partly because Coppola is reaching for so much. If he had wanted to simply embroider a duality theme he could have remade Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" in the Congo where the story originally took place. But Coppola sets the film in Vietnam, during the war, so that he could get at several other truths, or at least ask other questions. Coppola wants to point out that the war is mad, and that the Americans had been partially pulled into madness, and that only by fully abandoning themselves to madness, to Kurtz's amoral void -- by becoming "a snail sliding across a razor's edge," in his words -- could we have actually won. But it would have been a victory at too high a price.

I think "Apocalypse Now Redux" works better at the end now because it spells out the tension within Willard far more clearly than earlier versions did. Indeed, a new character actually goes as far as explaining Willard's duality to him, in a scene I'll get to in a minute.

The next new scene comes after the Playmate show. Clean is prattling on about Playboy bunnies, telling some story about a G.I. who became obsessed with Playboys. Lance goes water-skiing. Meanwhile, we hear Willard reading over some of Kurtz's writing about winning the war -- foreshadowing the manuscript that Willard will find at the compound (and echoing the writings of Conrad's original Kurtz). The writings say that Kurtz could win the war with hardened troops. Committed troops. The writings also remind of us of Willard's admiration for Charlie, who Willard says gets harder in the jungle, who considers cold rice and rat meat food R&R.

After the boat motors by a downed Red Cross helicopter the crew comes upon a shoddy little camp in the middle of a torrential downpour. We see the Playboy bunny helicopter on the landing pad. Willard steps out to investigate. He looks around for the camp's commanding officer. The grunts tell him that he stepped on a landmine. "Who's in charge?" asks Willard. "Don't ask me," says a G.I. (The same thing happens in the upcoming bridge scene.)

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