Amazon.com video review:
Digitally remastered with 49 minutes of previously unseen footage, Apocalypse Now Redux is the reference standard of Francis Coppola's 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 qualified success, more coherent than the original while inviting the same accusations of directorial excess. The restored "French plantation" sequence adds ghostly resonance to the war's absurdity, and Willard's theft of Colonel Kurtz's beloved surfboard adds welcomed humor to the film's 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 Willard's mission--and the performances of Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando--reach even greater heights of insanity, thus validating Redux as the rightful heir to Coppola's triumphantly rampant ambition. --Jeff Shannon
Amazon.com Essentials:
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 Conrad's 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 film's 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 Herzog's
Aguirre: The Wrath of
God, this film is the product of genius cast into a pit of
hell and emerging, phoenix-like, in triumph. Coppola's obsession
(effectively detailed in the riveting documentary
Hearts of
Darkness, directed by Coppola's wife, Eleanor) informs every
scene and every frame, and the result is a film for the ages.
--Jeff Shannon
Amazon.com video review:
Jumping on to the end-of-the-century bandwagon a little early,
Paramount Pictures released 10 of their top films in one 10-pack, the
Millennium Collection, in 1998. All the films are presented in their
widescreen editions; one, Breakfast at
Tiffany's, is offered in this format for the first time. The
set includes 5 Best Picture Oscar winners and films that took home an
additional 33 Academy Awards. All the tapes are available to buy
individually. The pack, with a handsome mosaic of faces from the
movies, also features collector gift cards (a movie version of
baseball cards) and a commemorative booklet detailing the productions
of all 10 films. The collection is oddly weighted toward the last 25
years, offering only one film from the 1950s and one from the
1960s. Your taste in current cinema will define the value of the
set. Besides Tiffany's, one of Audrey Hepburn's finest films,
the collection contains: The Ten Commandments
with Charlton Heston, Grease with John
Travolta, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and
The Godfather,
the funny, whale-saving Star Trek IV--The Voyage
Home, Tom Cruise's hit Top Gun, the smash
hit Ghost with
Demi Moore, Mel Gibson's Celt fest Braveheart, and Forrest Gump with
Tom Hanks. --Doug Thomas
Amazon.com Essentials:
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 Conrad's 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 film's 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 Herzog's
Aguirre: The Wrath of
God, this film is the product of genius cast into a pit of
hell and emerging, phoenix-like, in triumph. Coppola's obsession
(effectively detailed in the riveting documentary
Hearts of
Darkness, directed by Coppola's wife, Eleanor) informs every
scene and every frame, and the result is a film for the ages.
--Jeff Shannon
