Journey into Darkness - Film Review of Apocalypse Now Redux

The film released in 1979 was nominated for 8 Academy Awards, but with a re-mastered fuller soundtrack and reintegrated scenes Coppola’s classic has become epic. Coppola’s re-release of his visually beautiful, groundbreaking masterpiece has not become as Rob Vaux states, “longer, slower, [and] more bloated,�

The journey continues as the previous scene dissolves into the next foggy dawn’s mist. As the smoke, wreckage, and carnage increase along their watery route, the grief-stricken, crazed crew is fearful of Kurtz’s coming. As Fog drifts over the boat and they pass the wreckage of an airplane, Willard knows that what he is ordered to do is not going to be the way “they call it back in Nah Tranh.”

Francis Ford Coppola created a film that most critics say, “came close to some fundamental understanding of war as a state of mind” (Vaux). As one journeys with Captain Willard from the semblance of order in Saigon through the ever darkening jungle toward and through the horror that was (is) war, one begins to fully understand the difference between what society believes war is and should be and the terror that truly is war. The viewer watches as Willard and his crew discover the power and necessity of brutality, culminating with their encounter with the colonel/war-god Kurtz. By the end of the film, Willard’s statement, “Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500,” is fully explained. War is not about winning, but about winning at all costs. Toppman describes Kurtz as “believing the only way to win war is through ruthlessness,” (Toppman). Apocalypse Now Redux shows the absolute truth—and horror—of this.

In both films the viewer is taken on a journey with Captain Willard in a Naval PBR up the Nung River described by Vaux as, “engulfed with horror, bloodshed, & a U.S. military thrashing about like a headless animal,” on a mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz who has apparently gone insane (Vaux).

As Willard and the PBR crew travel deeper into Cambodia the horrors of war become more apparent. The men encounter a French plantation belonging to the de Madris family. Rob Vaux claims, “Though brilliantly shot, its overall tone jars ba

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