Shredded American flag undecidedly unfurled.
End of the world.
End of the river.
End of the line.
Bullets fly clean, piercing like diamonds.
Captain Sheen's eyes seem clean, keen, tragically
apathetic.
Antiseptic, narrating behind the mission, man, the
scheme:
Track down the lone ranger, despite the danger,
stranger than fiction,
Warrior/poet, mustang breaking reins, officer
breaking ranks.
Assassinating reigns.
Winning the war alone, but exiled inside its
belly.
Napalm peanut butter and jelly,
Beer and beach gear, USO Playboy Bunnies chopper out
of the sun,
dance on Vietnam.
"Charlie don't get no USO,
Charlie's idea of R&R is cold rice and rat
meat."
Can't cheat death with birth.
Scenes roll across the screen like storm clouds, like
emotions through towns, like malaria through
mosquitoes. Torpedoes underwater, courage falters,
exploded altars quiver and cry, shiver and lie, young
men die in the weeds like ants under a stampede,
blurring the line with ended lives between the sane
and the blood-stained. No richer, no poorer just
horror, the Horror.
Organ tying scene to scene, with dissonant melody, a
melancholy medley.
This masterpiece of film, survived too well the edit
room. Long across borders, especially the French
quarter, indulgence, stalling too, at times, but
never meek, making Ryan look like a movie of the
week. Always commanding, Always huge, A three-hour
tour, three-hour tour...
Charlie don't Surf, man! Charlie don't surf!
Director's Statement:
When I started with "Apocalypse Now," my intention
was to create a broad, spectacular film of epic
action-adventure scale that was also rich in theme
and philosophic inquiry into the mythology of
war.
But by the spring of 1979, we were terrified that
the film was too long, too strange and didn't resolve
itself in a kind of classic big battle at the end. We
were threatened with financial disaster. I had
mortgaged everything I owned to personally cover the
$16 million overage. And the press kept asking,
'Apocalypse When?' So we shaped the film that we
thought would work for the mainstream audience of its
day, keeping them focused on the journey up river and
making it as much a 'war' genre film as possible.
More than 20 years later, I happened to see the
picture on television. What struck me was that the
original film - which had been seen as so demanding,
strange and adventurous when it first came out - now
seemed relatively tame, as though the audience had
caught up to it. This, coupled with calls I received
over the years from people who had seen the original
4-hour plus assembly, encouraged me to go back and
try a new version.
Over the course of six months, beginning in March
2000, we edited and remixed a new rendition of the
movie from scratch. Rather than returning the 'lifts'
taken out of the film during the original editing, we
re-edited the film from the original unedited raw
footage - the 'dailies.'
This time we weren't working out of anxiety, so we
were able to think more about what the themes were,
especially about issues related to morality in war. I
feel any artist making a film about war by necessity
will make an 'anti-war' film and all war films are
usually that. My film is more of an 'anti-lie' film,
in that the fact that a culture can lie about what's
really going on in warfare, that people are being
brutalized, tortured, maimed and killed, and somehow
present this as moral is what horrifies me, and
perpetuates the possibility of war. One line in John
Milius' original script suggest this, "They teach the
boys to drop fire on people, but won't let them write
the word 'f*ck' on their airplanes." In the words of
Joseph Conrad: "I hate the stench of a lie."
This new, complete definitive version extends this
idea to all young people, boys and girls, who are
sent out to function in an established immoral world
expected to function in a moral way. The result is a
film that has 49 minutes of never-before-seen
footage; is more attentive to theme, and is sexier,
funnier, more bizarre, more romantic and is more
politically intriguing. The new material is spread
throughout the film, and highlighted by the addition
of the French plantation sequence, an expanded
Playboy playmates sequence, new footage of the navy
patrol boat near the start of is journey up river,
and a new Brando scene - one that perhaps couldn't be
shown twenty years ago as it provides clear facts as
to how the American public was lied to.
Ultimately, my with "Apocalypse Now Redux" was to
achieve a richer, fuller and more textured film
experience that, as with the original, lets audiences
feel what Vietnam was like: the immediacy, the
insanity, the exhilaration, the horror, the
sensuousness, and the moral dilemma of America's most
surreal and nightmarish war.
Francis Ford Coppola, May 2001
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