Classic 70s Movie: “Apocalypse Now”
September is Classic 70s Movie month. Today’s guest post comes from Rahul Prasad.
Movie Title: Apocalypse Now
Year: 1979
Writers: Written by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola, based on Joseph Conrad’s book “Heart of Darkness”
Lead Actors: Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Marlon Brando
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
IMDB Plot Summary: During the U.S.-Viet Nam War, Captain Willard is sent on a dangerous mission into Cambodia to assassinate a renegade colonel who has set himself up as a god among a local tribe.
Why I Think This Is A Classic 70s Movie: Whoa! What a loaded question this is! And half a page? I could write page after page why I think this is a classic movie period! Not just a 70s classic. I don’t think you could try and encapsulate why this is such a classic without knowing about or watching the documentary “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse”.
The journey of the production is as riveting as the movie itself. Indeed, the mere fact that Coppola was able to find a movie, let alone a classic, out of the troubled production (sets destroyed by typhoons that struck the Phillipines, Sheen suffering a heart attack, money running out which meant Coppola nearly went bankrupt and Brando turning up on set overweight and not having learnt his lines with production being shut down for a week as Coppola and Brando discussed ways around filming his character). As Coppola himself admitted, “There were too many of us, we had access to too much equipment, too much money and little by little went insane”.
The movie itself deals with Willard’s journey upriver through the jungle and him being witness to the slow descent into madness of all those around him. His reason for taking on the mission to terminate Col. Kurtz has as much to do about him trying to escape the madness and his own insanity than it has to do with him being a soldier. As he reads the dossier on Kurtz he understands that Kurtz and him are alike and much the same. However he also knows that if he descends into the evilness around him, he will never escape. Having barely recovered from a breakdown at the start of the movie when we meet him, Willard sees Kurtz as his evil mirror image and feels he has to kill him to cleanse his soul and return home with some semblance of a normal man (having failed to do so from his previous tour of Vietnam).
Coppola bravely and very wisely depicts the excesses of the Americans throughout the movie. Without trying to understand their enemy, the US Army and the soldiers wreak havoc and destruction wherever they go evidenced by the all out helicopter gunship attack on a enemy village replete with Wagner blasting out from speakers as they approach led by the fearless and surf-loving leader, Lt. Col. Kilgore (an electric and mesmerizing performance by Robert Duvall). Indeed, these scenes in the first act of death and destruction are gorgeously filmed by Vittorio Storaro and exquisitely mounted and elaborate set-pieces (the napalm air-strikes) convey the epic proportions of the scale of devastation left in the wake of the US involvement in Vietnam.
The film explores themes of isolation and loneliness and attempts by the US Army and soldiers to make themselves feel at home (surfing waves, sitting by a fire playing guitar and drinking beer and eating comfort food, lusting after and fighting with each other to get at Playboy playmates at a concert). To cope the men around Willard turn to drugs, booze and masking their faces and indulging in increasingly erratic and reckless behavior.
Coppola also explores the theme of power and its misuse in a lawless world where smaller acts of crime (Kurtz’s murder of South Vietnamese double agents) are punishable but larger acts of violence are rubber-stamped as important victories in the fight for freedom. Overall, Apocalypse Now explores the darkness within us all and is a cautionary tale of the spiraling nature of the descent into evil accompanied by insanity that we can so easily succumb to and once caught within the vortex find so hard to escape from.
My Favorite Moment In The Movie: The whole helicopter gunship assault sequence. From the Wagner music score blasting from the speakers, to Kilgore wanting Lance (Sam Bottoms) to surf the six foot peak waves as the village around him is being bombed followed by the Napalm air-strike sequence is nothing short of surreal in the most spectacular way. Gorgeously filmed and shot, it comes at you within the first 20 minutes of the start of the movie and immediately gives you an insight into the madness, insanity and the hopelessness of that situation.
My Favorite Dialogue In the Movie:
Kilgore: Smell that? You smell that?
Lance: What?
Kilgore: Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that.
[kneels]
Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn’t find one of ’em, not one stinkin’ dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like
[sniffing, pondering]
Kilgore: victory. Someday this war’s gonna end…
Key Things You Should Look For When Watching This Movie: While it may seem to be just a war movie, Apocalypse Now is much more than that. Themes of abuse of power, loneliness and isolation in foreign lands, descent into evil, journey into the mouth of madness, the greed and excess of man, wanton death and destruction and disregard for human life and liberties in the name of justice and freedom are all explored within this film. Apocalypse Now also heavily informs us that the worst dangers and evil lurk not around us but within us and once we have descended into the darkness it is virtually impossible for us to find our way out with our sanity intact. The heavy toll that war inflicts on us not just physically but also on our soul is explored through Willard’s journey to find Col. Kurtz (he’s trying to find himself) and terminate him (again, he is trying to kill his demons so he can go back home with some semblance of normalcy so he can survive a new jungle).
Thanks, Rahul! To show our gratitude for your guest post, here’s a dash of creative juju for you. Whoosh!
We already have a set of 80s Movies and 90s Movies. This month, we’re working on 70s Movies.
Thanks to all of you for your participation in this project, creating a resource for writers, movies we should all watch to help learn the craft of screenwriting!
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