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"Apocalypse Now" : A Brief Review

204.196.181.118

Posted by AudioHead on October 6, 1999 at 14:22:50

Francis Coppola's famous quote, "This is not a film ABOUT Vietnam; this
film IS Vietnam", gives revealing insight into the filmmaker's intentions
when making his visionary war epic, "Apocalypse Now".
From that statement it is not difficult to draw parallels between the film
and the war it sought to portray: both were overlong and costly; both began with a sense of purpose and ended with ambiguous, unsatisfying
resolutions; and both displayed a surreality borne of a nasty little war
which simply could not be won under the absurd conditions imposed.
This absurdity is aptly highlighted by Lt. Colonel Kilgore's self-satisfied
statement, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning".
It is not by accident that towards the end of the film, the mad, renegade Colonel Kurtz read passages from T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men"; without
being specific, here are a few from the poem: "Shape without form, shade
without colour...Paralysed force, gesture without motion...Those who have
crossed with direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom...Remember us - if at
all - not as lost...Violent souls... but only as the hollow men...the
stuffed men...In this last of meeting places...We grope together...And
avoid speech...Gathered on this beach of the tumid river" - ("Mistah Kurtz-
he dead" - 1925).
"If all war is hell, then the Vietnam War was a patently absurd one" is
the statement I believe Mr. Coppola attempted to make in "Apocalypse Now".

- AudioHead

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