By Matt Zoller Seitz

Apocalypse Now Redux
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

In a summer where Steven Spielberg’s broken-backed, relentlessly self-referential fairytale inspires a sad pantomime of critical controversy, it’s good to be reminded what real daring looks like. Twenty-two years after its initial release in August of 1979–one of the earliest blockbuster summers–Francis Coppola choppers into the current wasteland with Apocalypse Now Redux, a recut version of his notoriously grandiose Vietnam blockbuster. As you’ve heard, the new version contains 49 minutes of footage Coppola cut from the earlier release–and unlike other so-called "restorations," this one is more than a DVD promotional tactic. It brings long-lost sequences known only through film history books to glorious life–including the much-discussed sequence on a ghostly French plantation, and a sad, touching encounter between the patrol boat crew and some stranded Playboy bunnies they ogled at a USO show. It redefines not just our impressions of Apocalypse Now, but the conceptual potential of war movies–and it rattles our cynical notions of what Hollywood filmmaking can be.

"Saigon," rasps the film’s narrator, Army assassin Ben Willard (Martin Sheen), in the film’s opening line. "I’m still only in Saigon." But don’t be lulled by familiar words: From the movie’s curtain-raising napalm strike through its unexpectedly touching and muted finale, Apocalyse Redux is a different experience. Coppola pored over preserved raw footage with his longtime editor, the sound-and-vision wizard Walter Murch, resurrecting connective scenes and throwaway moments of character development, reviving sequences that were cut to make the film more commercial. Over the course of three hours and 16 minutes, it expands not just the original film’s running time but its emotional reach and political scope.

The original was dogged by recurring (and, frankly, valid) complaints. The pace was jumpy, the characterizations thin, the politics virtually nonexistent. Critics wary of the director-as-rock-star phenomenon–which persisted from Bonnie and Clyde through the disaster of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate a year after the release of Apocalypse–said Coppola was in over his head from the get-go. They said he swaggered into the Philippine jungle armed with Godfather-plated arrogance, a staggering-for-the-time $13 million budget and no ending, and emerged with a fitfully brilliant mess in which high-tech spectacle trumped emotion and good sense. He was caricatured as an overreacher, an overspender, a gifted screenwriter desperate to prove he could be a visionary artiste without help from a pre-sold blockbuster novel. They even said the film’s visual richness was largely the work of Coppola’s cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, who gave Bernardo Bertolucci’s 70s masterworks their incandescent rotting luster.

Critics complained that Willard was a fuzzy witness to madness, rather than an active, engaged protagonist–and pointed out that since he was apparently crazy before the Kurtz mission, his character didn’t grow or change. They said the depiction of the Vietnamese rivaled The Deer Hunter in dehumanizing dismissiveness, and the film’s much-ballyhooed embodiment of evil was just a rich, fat Method superstar fishing for another monster payday while ignoring the picture’s literary roots. And so on. (If you’re thinking of arguing that today’s A.I. detractors are the contemporary equivalent of Coppola’s foes during the Carter era, remember this: Spielberg today, unlike Coppola then, has near-absolute control over his work.)

Apocalypse Now defied the entertainment press’ dire predictions, becoming a modest box office hit and racking up numerous (mostly technical) awards. But the whiff of misguided ambition has followed it through the decades–and as Coppola wandered deeper into technical experimentation, flitting from abortive musical fantasy (One from the Heart) to glossy teen melodrama (The Outsiders) to glorified gun-for-hire work (The Rainmaker, Jack), his Vietnam experiment started to seem like the first frayed threads in a slowly unraveling career.

Of course, if you know a little bit about how films get made, you know that many creative decisions made by filmmakers aren’t about artistic will. They’re about self-defense, market pressure and the vagaries of fate. Coppola now freely admits that he hacked out those 49 minutes because the movie’s distributor was freaking out, and he couldn’t help responding in kind. UA had sunk $13 million into the project, only to watch in horror as the budget more than doubled. Shooting stretched out for 15 punishing months, during which key sets were wiped out in a typhoon; Sheen survived a heart attack; Brando made an army-sized crew sit around twiddling their thumbs while he figured out what to do on any given day–provided, of course, that he felt like performing at all. Despite the Cannes Film Festival’s unprecedented award of the Palme d’Or to an unfinished preview version of Apocalypse in spring of ’79, the studio feared it was about to release the mother of all bombs. Coppola mortgaged everything he owned to cover the film’s budget overages, then sliced it to the bone to make it look more like a hip, psychedelic war spectacle and less like what it was: a meditative, literary exploration of war, indebted equally to Conrad and Homer.

The recut version is still far from perfect. The lurching rhythms of the ’79 version have been replaced by a slow-motion hemorrhage of rich ideas; some are so lucid and boldly realized that they nearly achieve a feat that’s supposedly beyond the reach of cinema: they explain complex philosophical concepts without words, and without condescension. The clearest example is the restored plantation sequence, in which the boys on the boat encounter French colonials who refuse to admit defeat and Willard has an opium-tinged tryst with a young widow named Roxanne (Aurore Clement). As David Thomson correctly observed in a recent Times article, the sequence doesn’t just deepen and soften the formerly opaque, macho hero. It certifies a female stake in the war genre, and reminds us what violence truly means: it’s not merely an assertion of manhood, but a rejection of womanhood–a repudiation of fertility, empathy and hope. And it plugs into the film’s now fully elaborated system of dualities: darkness and sunlight; femininity and masculinity; technology and nature; Christianity and Buddhism; cruelty and love. Storaro’s delicate chiaroscuro, written off by some ’79 naysayers as an affectation, ties it all together with light. (An exchange between Roxanne and Willard inadvertently justifies this reissue: "Do you know why you can never step in the same river twice?" "Because it’s always moving.")

Other ideas don’t quite come off–particularly the finale in Kurtz’s compound, which still seems less Conradian than Tarzan-esque. And Michael Herr’s narration still seems hipster-glib in places ("Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500"). The film’s Heart of Darkness narrative spine still disintegrates as the heroes’ patrol boat snakes up the Mekong River, suggesting not just a retreat from reason but a director’s inability to end the damned thing. (When Chief tells Willard, "You got us into this mess and now you can’t get us out because you don’t know where you’re going, do ya?," we’re also seeing a director forcing an actor to tell him the truth.) Brando’s performance, lengthened by several fresh minutes, still seems half-baked. (Though in fairness to Brando, both then and now, anyone who’s read Heart of Darkness or seen the TNT movie version with John Malkovich as Kurtz knows the role is a stubborn abstraction–and perhaps unplayable.)

Since anyone reading this has likely seen the original cut, I’ll skip over plot summary and list some of the more striking changes. There’s the plantation sequence, notable not just for Roxanne’s woozy tenderness, but for the lengthy, necessary political discussion over dinner, which lets the plantation owner (the late Christian Marquand) remind Willard (and the audience) that the Vietnamese saw the American incursion not as a potentially culture-ending event, but as the latest phase in a never-ending guerrilla war against invaders. We are also reminded that the U.S. military’s most persistent enemy, the Vietcong, evolved from the Vietminh, who were supported and largely created by the OSS, forerunner of the CIA, in the 40s. The Vietnamese are transformed, through the addition of a few judicious moments, from an anonymous, implacable horde into a kind of Greek chorus, watching in disgust and fascination as the tech-crazy, pop-suckled Yanks turn their country into an arena-rock spectacle of death. (Premonition after the fact: 22 years down the road, the slow pan across Asian faces watching the Playboy USO show foretells Hollywood’s globalized future.)

Anyone whose first filmic exposure to the Vietcong came from Rambo will write off these moments as wonky digressions, but they’re actually crucial; it’s an example of Coppola and cowriter John Milius boldly reminding us (and themselves) that the war was not a uniquely American experience, and that only a blinkered American would dare think so. These dollops of politics and sociology are strewn through Redux like a breadcrumb trail, connecting Conrad’s 19th-century colonialist nightmares to 20th-century Third World conflicts. In scene after newly recut scene, Coppola asks us to use mythology to imagine our way into the recent past–and to do it without much help from the movie. Can you even remember the last time a big-budget historical movie required you to know something about the subject going in? Unless the director is Spielberg or Oliver Stone (who isn’t allowed to get near big-budget history lessons after Nixon), the answer is "No."

The small stuff: There’s more of the boys in the boat–the saucier Chef (Frederic Forrest), a rasping biker doodle in ’79, seems bigger, sadder, warmer; he yammers sexist nonsense and bemoans his wasted potential. The hints of deep-rooted brotherly loyalty between the boat’s two black sailors, the elder Chief (Albert Hall) and the hotheaded Bronx punk Clean (Laurence Fishburne), are teased out and filled in. For Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall), the surfing-obsessed, napalm-crazy Air Cav honcho, the additional minutes are more than a madness bonus. They excavate contradictions in his character that were glimpsed only briefly in the ’79 cut, and make him seem both more monstrous and more human–more monstrous because he is more human. His interest in acid-tripping California surf god Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms) now seems less like a middle-aged man’s power-juiced nostalgia trip than a prepubescent’s obsessive male crush. Kilgore dotes on this fair-haired visitor, monitoring his needs the way an old-school movie producer might pamper a star, and Lance–like Kilgore, a fancy cipher in ’79–responds with a stoner’s sense of privilege. (Refusing to surf in artillery-pounded waters, he says: "I’m an artist.")

Even Willard gains stature, now that we’re allowed to see more of Sheen’s intuitive, internalized performance. More is made of the character’s hard-drinking lifestyle, transforming it from a film noir cliche into a clear-cut case of wartime alcoholism–a military-manufactured demon anesthetizing his own worst fears about how evil he’s become. Early in Redux, Willard steals the Colonel’s surfboard, humanizing himself to the boys in the boat, then steals back that humanity farther upriver, coolly executing a peasant woman who was wounded in a My Lai-style sampan massacre. The sampan execution was a centerpiece in the ’79 version, leading some to accuse Willard of motiveless cruelty; the surfboard theft wound up on the cutting-room floor. Seeing both images of Willard is a minor revelation; the tumblers of perception click into place, and you see what Coppola and Milius were getting at–not a journey into madness, but a journey through madness and away from wartime hypocrisy; a tactical retreat from institutionalized lies about battlefield honor and inborn American morality. Willard steals Kilgore’s surfboard early on because he believes sincere emotion is still possible, even in Vietnam. By the time of the sampan massacre, he’s read about Kurtz and thought about Kurtz and pondered the decision to "get out of the boat" and reject lies. When he executes the civilian, he’s teaching his comrades a lesson he’s only beginning to learn himself. By the film’s ritualistic finale–barely recut, yet vastly more powerful–he’s figured himself out. There’s only one right choice: disarm, then get back on the boat.