Apocalypse Now - The Complete
Dossier (Two-Disc Special Collectors
Edition) starring Martin Sheen,
Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall,
Frederic Forrest, Laurence Fishburne
Back In The Day
I love the smell of a collectors edition in the morning. Everyones favorite
Joseph Conrad adaptation gets the fancy packaging and extras treatment
with this release of Apocalypse Now - The Complete Dossier. Both the
original theatrical cut and the 2001 Redux version are included, with
enough extras to keep one occupied on a long boat trip. Calling this the
complete dossier is sure to raise hackles among fan s who insist that
Eleanor Coppolas lauded documentary, Hearts of Darkness, which
chronicled husband Franciss harrowing experience making the film, should
have been included. (As of this review, Hearts of Darkness has yet to be
released on DVD, so battered VHS copies will have to suffice.) Packaged
in a cardboard dossier sleeve, the two-disc set includes Marlon Brando
reading T.S. Eliots poem The Hollow Men, new production featurettes, and
cast member interviews. Owners of previous editions of either of the cuts
might consider how much they want all the officially sanctioned information
on this edition. For newcomers to the Vietnam epic, this is an edition worth
going crazy for. --Ryan Boudinot Apocalypse Now
In the tradition of such obsessively driven directors as Erich von Stroheim
and Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola approached the production of
Apocalypse Now as if it were his own epic mission into the heart of
darkness. On location in the storm-ravaged Philippines, he quite literally
went mad as the project threatened to devour him in a vortex of creative
despair, but from this insanity came one of the greatest films ever made. It
began as a John Milius screenplay, transposing Joseph Conrads classic
story Heart of Darkness into the horrors of the Vietnam War, following a
battle-weary Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) on a secret upriver mission to
find and execute the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has
reverted to a state of murderous and mystical insanity. The journey is
fraught with danger involving wartime action on epic and intimate scales.
One measure of the films awesome visceral impact is the number of
sequences, images, and lines of dialogue that have literally burned
themselves into our cinematic consciousness, from the Wagnerian strike of
helicopter gunships on a Vietnamese village to the brutal murder of
stowaways on a peasant sampan and the unflinching fearlessness of the
surfing warrior Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who speaks
lovingly of the smell of napalm in the morning. Like Herzogs Aguirre: The
Wrath of God, this film is the product of genius cast into a pit of hell and
emerging, phoenix-like, in triumph. Coppolas obsession (effectively
detailed in the riveting documentary Hearts of Darkness, directed by
Coppolas wife, Eleanor) informs every scene and every frame, and the
result is a film for the ages. --Jeff Shannon
Apocalypse Now Redux
Digitally remastered with 49 minutes of previously unseen footage,
Apocalypse Now Redux is the reference standard of Francis Coppolas
1979 epic. A metaphorical hallucination of the Vietnam War, the film was
reconstructed by Coppola and editor Walter Murch to enrich themes and
clarify the ending. On that basis Redux is a qualifie d success, more
coherent than the original while inviting the same accusations of directorial
excess. The restored French plantation sequence adds ghostly resonance
to the wars absurdity, and Willards theft of Colonel Kurtzs beloved
surfboard adds welcomed humor to the films nightmarish upriver journey.
An encounter with Playboy Playmates seems superfluous compared to the
enhanced interplay between Willard and his ill-fated boat crew, but
compensation arrives in the hellish Kurtz compound, where Willards
mission--and the performances of Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando--reach
even greater heights of insanity, thus validating Redux as the rightful heir
to Coppolas triumphantly rampant ambition. --Jeff Shannon
When I saw this movie when it first came out, I was truly blown away.
When it was over all I could do was shake my head and exhale over &
over. My girlfriend at the time ask me what was wrong, when we got in the
car I could not speak. This movie made me want to become a film director.
When I moved to L.A. a couple of years later I went to film school, but
needless to say that didnt happen. The opening scene is one of the best,
it really set the tone for the rest of the movie. I have NEVER had that
experience again. A fantanstic movie.
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