55. Apocalypse Now

"War is hell" is an old, outdated maxim. This movie makes it plain: War is insanity.

This film is about going crazy. More to the point, it's about breaking points, the points at which those in extreme circumstances -- in this case, war -- turn the corner and become enveloped in their insanity. It's about driving off a cliff.

For those who think "high-concept" movies are inherently dumb, this is an exception to the rule. The high-concept here is: a decorated soldier is sent on an assassination mission -- to kill one of his own! Like Lorne Michael's said: "Write it good, it's Hamlet; write it bad, it's Gilligan's Island." Coppola and Milius wrote it good, and that's why it's on this list.

Luckily, they had help. The script is loosely based off of "Heart of Darkness", the classic novel. But the adaptation is loose in the very sense of the word -- Campbell's book was not about war, didn't have scenes of soldiers surfing. But somehow, like a lot of the best adaptations ("There Will Be Blood" and "The Shining" come to mind), this looseness is part of the movie's power in that the director is able to take certain characters and thematic concerns and infuse them with his own sensibilities, pacing, music choices, and mise-en-scene.

Unluckily, they had some problems. Sets were destroyed by weather, actors were constantly on drugs, other actors had to be replaced or shot around due to creative differences or medical issues, the Phillipines military was uncooperative. All this leads into one of the most remarkable aspects of the movie that you can actually glean from the narrative but that really is illuminated by Eleanor Coppola's documentary "Hearts of Darkness", which is this: the physical production of the film matched both the narrative as well as the theme. In other words, everyone went crazy making a movie about people going crazy.

Structurally, it's works well. I believe that Coppola, like a lot of great filmmakers, was stealing and inspired by one of the best filmmakers ever: Terrence Malick. He made a dreamy, otherworldly movie that's structured in vignettes. But what makes them work so well is their economy: Our main character, Willard (Sheen), is given a task (think Starling in "Silence of the Lambs") and puts it into motion (act 1). In doing the job that he is given with no questions asked -- a Puritanical notion more than anything -- he meets these other soldiers and gets into a variety of scenarios (act 2), leading to the final confrontation with his object of desire (act 3). That's it in a nutshell, and the narrative is simply filled with a variety of bits to fill in the blanks.

The most famous of these, rightly so, is with Kilgore (Duvall). Willard and his boat crew meet up with Kilgore and Kilgore discovers one of the men is a professional surfer. He insists they go surfing together, raiding and clearing out a village with good waves to do so. Again, a task is set-up and completed to a satisfying pay-off, and in the meantime we get the theme illuminated in a different way and as the audience we get the pleasure of a great actor speaking iconic lines: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning", "Charlie don't surf", "You know, one day this war is going to be over".

The thing to take away from this movie -- the thing it does remarkably well that we could learn from -- is that it takes a theme ("war is insanity") and stretches it to the absolute limit. We see the aforementioned Kilgore, obviously insane, but who relishes the chaos -- he's insane but in his element. We see a raid on a peaceful village just to surf -- a crazy thing to do, but the reasons or justifications for murder don't mean much to the dead. We see a stoned character, Chef, walking through the jungle to collect mangoes and is almost killed by a tiger -- this is an insane thing to do, and the result is Chef's breaking point reached. The soldiers go crazy from seeing the prurient dances of the Playboy bunnies -- their sexual breaking point is reached.

And, of course, Kurtz' compound is the ultimate, physical manifestation of insanity, rolling all of the previous craziness into one big ball and one built-up character. Kurtz' is out of his mind, but that's because he embodies the spirit of the warrior. And war is insanity.