There is a point in Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut when soldier-assassin, Capt. Willard emerges from Col. Kurtz’s compound, shrouded in black, hair like an oil slick, eyes blazing with Nietzschean affirmation that makes you want to prostrate yourself at his feet with Kurtz’s Montagnard followers. We have followed Willard to the brutal conclusion of his mission, sometimes as a willing accomplice, at other times as a hostage, dragged kicking and screaming on a boat we can never (or secretly don’t want to) get off. We have marvelled and awed at the cinematic megalomania unspooling before our eyes, whilst being fully immersed in the pits of horror that superior American technology propped up by an inferior ideology, can savagely excavate on the soil of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
And as Willard’s boat knifes away through the water and the stark black and white credits roll, we realise that Willard’s mission is only half done. He has yet to return to the military-industrial complex that created him and pronounce Kurtz’s “unsound” methods as the new gospel of warfare. Or will he renege on his promise to Kurtz and add to, “the stench of lies” that Kurtz so despises? Like Willard, Frances Ford Coppola needed to emerge from the jungle shoot that nearly killed his leading man, that destroyed his sets with nature’s wrath in the form of a typhoon, that saw him days away from becoming ruined and bankrupt, that saw five previous Oscars hurled from a window like meaningless minarets and tell the executives and accountants that to create a 30 million dollar (200 million dollars today) piece of art you must tie yourself to the mast like Odysseus and experience the visceral devastation of every creative moment.
Coppola’s latest restoration of his masterpiece (now shorter than 2001’s “Redux” version), the second half of his mission, has now reached its zenith 40 years after Apocalypse Now’s original release. His own “unsound” methods now fully justify the means as The Final Cut looks, sounds and feels like it was only completed yesterday, set free from Pandora’s box as a chaotic symbol of hope for cinematic art that paradoxically Apocalypse Now helped to destroy with its Byzantine production problems. As the box opens or the film flies out of the projector, purple and yellow smoke shoots across the screen, tiger orange fire tears through the emeralds and jades of the jungle, fearful imagery framed by men pretending to be gods, and helicopter blades cascade and fade from all corners of the cinema like military-grade progressive rock.
In fact, listening to the thunderous soundtrack laser and stab in great swathes of sonic bombast, pompous and grandiose, Wagnerian electronica lashing our ears, Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut is really a Joseph Conrad concept album reimagined as a film. Just look at the cover of the soundtrack or the film poster, the nuclear explosion disguised as a sunrise sliced in half by microscopic gunships, the river without end, the barbed wire font, psychedelic acid rock imagery if ever there was. Capt. Willard’s immense close ups, sweat pouring, are framed by monstrous synthesisers and low-frequency drums as if he, alone, can hear the doom-laden soundtrack to his life as he travels up river to confront his own “Heart of Darkness”.
Willard is a man who needs war, needs a mission, as he has no other place where his existence makes sense. Witness the choppers strafe back and forth across his Saigon hotel table, a fever dream of dissolves, booze and PTSD, fan blades and bloody hands, Willard fears that the brass won’t come to take him back to the war. Without knowing it, he already has the clarity of purpose required by Kurtz to prosecute the Vietnam war according to his doctrine, “You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.” Willard executes a young Vietnamese woman after a needles massacre of civilians with ruthless efficiency and mourns his dead men; he needs to wrestle with his shadow self in Kurtz to realise the truth, that he has been already radicalised by his classified masters in green to, “terminate…with extreme prejudice.”
Every frame of the restoration drips with purpose, the swirl of black smoke next to a helicopter, soldiers standing on the bamboo scaffolding in front of a church, the snap of a grenade launcher. Black soldiers hold the line long after their white officers have deserted them at the Do Lung Bridge the gateway to hell; skulls and heads line Kurtz’s compound, totems to his own perverse colonisation and corruption of the Vietnamese people remade in his own warped fantasy of what a “noble savage” might be. Coppola has left in the French Plantation section first seen in Redux as a reminder of the hubris of empire building, hallucinatory ghosts of Vietnam’s past, a sojourn that infuriates but entices in equal measure.
In 2019, you could project Trump’s narcissism and white-supremacist rants onto Kurtz, but that gives that odious president too much credit. After all, this was a man who confused Agent Orange with Napalm when addressing several veterans’ groups, “That stuff from that movie?” Trump is a criminal buffoon where Nixon in his drive to become president undermined LBJ’s peace process costing America to lose a further 25,000 soldiers and countless more Vietnamese lives and when president he ordered the bombing of Cambodia.
Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut is a herculean undertaking; Coppola proclaimed, “My film is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam,” it is an odyssey, a trial that every enthusiast of the cinema must undergo to fully appreciate cinema at its most triumphant and antagonistic, one of those rare cinematic Leviathans that is ridden and experienced rather than watched. In that final scene, the clatter of rifles and spears falling to the stone ground at Willard’s feet should be seen as deference to adult blockbusters, a last stand against Disney’s innumerable franchises. With Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut, we get the sense of a battle won but with Disney+ looming large the war has already been lost.
“The horror… the horror.”