Coppola's devastating anti-war film that's more horror than drama.
The crowning achievement from
Francis Ford Coppola, and one of the finest war films (or more accurately anti-war) of all time.
Apocalypse Now is a dark and labyrinthine odyssey into the heart of madness, and the way war drives humanity to the brink - to the gates of a Hell that’s as internal as it is external - where a bottomless void awaits to swallow the sanity and lives of those who approach.
Based on the novella “
Heart of Darkness” by
Joseph Conrad, Coppola expanded Conrad’s haunting ethereality to the big screen, where during the
Vietnam War, a young army officer, Capt. Willard, already teetering on the verge of self-annihilation, receives a special mission to hunt down and assassinate a deranged Special Forces Colonel who has created his own cult-like death squad in the depths of Cambodia.
Hallucinatory set pieces and surreal horrors accompany Capt. Willard as closely as his own shadow on his Stygian journey through the remote jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia, as Willard increasingly views his mission as nothing short of suicide.
Apocalypse Now is one of those films for me which never loses its power to hold my heart in a vice grip, constantly evoking a state of fight-or-flight, where to fight means to travel along with Capt. Willard into the unfathomable unknown. It may not have the genre tag of horror, but
Apocalypse Now is out-and-out a horror film, and the monster hiding under the bed is our own primeval reflection, regressed, twisted and morphed, by the maddening violence of war.
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