GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW


The Miramax marketing department really missed the boat here; the best title for this film at this particular time would be Pearl Harbor My Ass! As both the ultimate refutation of the rah-rah war movie and the ne plus ultra of the visionary cinematic spectacle, even a revival of the original 1979 cut of Apocalypse Now would be a welcome, no, make that a necessary remedy to the vile strain of dulce-et-decorum-est fever that's infecting the cinematic zeitgeist.

Director Francis Ford Coppola's new cut of the movie, Apocalypse Now Redux, adds 53 minutes to the first version, and it is stronger medicine indeed. I wouldn't call this an improvement over the original release, though. It's more of an expansion of greatness. Loosely adapted from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, this Vietnam epic follows the hallucinatory journey of fractured intelligence officer Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) upriver into Cambodia, where he has been ordered to find renegade commander Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) and, in the now-famous phrase, terminate his command "with extreme prejudice." Coppola hasn't tinkered with his ending, which was originally the target of much critical vexation (the director didn't help matters much by making his struggle to concoct a suitable denouement so public at the time), nor has he considerably expanded Brando's controversial performance — there's a new scenelet featuring the actor, but it's probably the shortest of this new version's additions.

What he has done seems pretty simple at first: He lengthened the encounter with the crazed surfing fanatic Lt. Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), added a bit to the sequence at Kurtz's compound, and restored two very substantive sequences: one involving the Playboy Playmates, who had nearly caused a riot in the original's USO show sequence, and another taking place at a seemingly suspended-in-time French plantation, where Willard and company briefly take shelter. (Both of these sequences add a heretofore absent element of sexuality to the picture.) The overall effect, though, is one of almost horrific envelopment — the nightmare of war is given larger, more haunting, almost oppressive dimensions. Ernest Hemingway once said, "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime." Pearl Harbor is a grotesque, out-and-out denial of the basic truth Hemingway articulated; one of the signal virtues of Apocalypse Now and Apocalypse Now Redux is that no matter how far it takes us into the surreal, it never loses sight of that truth.

— Glenn Kenny