Apocalypse Now Review

When Apocalypse Now was released in 1979, it set the benchmark for what all Vietnam War era films would hope to aspire to. Unfortunately, films such as Casualties of War would mistake this benchmark for a tree after a long night of drinking and piss all over it. When you have Marty McFly and Jeff Spicoli together in a movie about Vietnam, it had better be a comedy...or at least a buddy cop movie.

For the uninitiated, Apocalypse Now was originally based on the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness, and set in the African Congo. It was later re-made into a musical, then into a short lived Disney on Ice show. Martin Scorscese updated the film to make it socially relevant, set it in Vietnam rather than the African Congo, and started out the movie with a close up of green-beret-gone-apeshit Martin Sheen’s ass-crack—and it doesn’t let up from there. This was a brave move on Scorscese’s part, due to the immense popularity of the war (and Martin Sheen’s ass-crack), and how unfavorable it was looked upon to question the rationale behind both of them. The movie was later re-made for television, set in the middle of the Korean War conflict, and featured wisecracking Alan Alda.

Sheen’s mission is simple: go up the Vietcong river into Cambodia and dispatch of Colonel Kurtz "with extreme prejudice." Sheen somehow interprets this order as "saunter up the river taking your sweet-ass time and fall in love with the guy we want you to kill" then proceeds to spend the better part of the next two hours hanging out on a boat, stopping occasionally to shoot peasants and smoke pot. When he finally reaches Kurtz (an old, bald, sweaty Marlon Brando) he finds he cannot bring himself to kill, and instead promptly gets thrown into a prison cell.

With the homoerotic tension between Sheen and Brando reaching a boiling point, Sheen somehow sweet-talks his way out, and hacks Kurtz to into bite-size pieces with a machete. The pieces, however, don’t stay apart long. The pull themselves back together and form Mecha-Kurtz! Luckily, Sheen is able to knock him into a vat of molten steel, which it turns out is the only way to defeat Mecha-Kurtz.

I give this movie a 38AAA.