Apocalypse Now

Annotation for KRRR! 2018 by Jaroslav Cibulka

During a press conference at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where Apocalypse won the top prize, the Palme d’Or, director Francis Ford Coppola famously said of his war opus: “My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. We made it the way the Americans fought the Vietnam War. We were in the jungle and there were so many of us. We had access to too much money and equipment. Little by little, we were moving beyond the limits of madness.”

The original sixteen-week shooting schedule, like the budget, grew significantly. Coppola spent a total of 238 days on location in the Philippine jungle and spent $25 million. The crew was plagued by tropical diseases, unbearable heat and humidity, monsoon rains, and typhoons, one of which destroyed props and halted filming for two months. The smell of rat carcasses and human corpses on set was unbearable. The helicopters were loaned from dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and because of the raging war with the rebels, the government sent different pilots every day. Several times, the helicopters were completely withdrawn in the midst of the logistically complicated filming. The main star Marlon Brando refused to cooperate, and the leading actor Martin Sheen was in the midst of a battle with alcoholism and suffered a heart attack. Coppola had an epileptic seizure and suffered a nervous breakdown. He called the filming a “twenty million disaster.” He guaranteed it with his own assets and was close to bankruptcy. “It’s bigger than I thought. It’s gigantic.” Chaos and madness also reign in the film itself, based on Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. The plot is moved from the Congo at the beginning of the last century to the Cambodian jungle in the middle of the Vietnam War. Captain Willard is tasked with a mission to track down and eliminate Walter Curtz, a once exceptional colonel who has deserted and is leading a tribe of natives in a private war against the rest of the world. Willard and his crew follow him upstream on the Mekong River, making several stops on their journey, which takes on the characteristics of a hallucinogenic, spiritual pilgrimage. All of them are permeated by motifs of violence and irrationality, which together create a suggestive and hypnotic image of the American experience of the Vietnam War. In addition to the above, Coppola also emphasized the motif of spectacle: “Wherever an American soldier sets foot, there is a huge show.” In addition to death and madness, in the Cambodian jungle we find LSD, pyrotechnics, cowboy hats, the Rolling Stones, Wagner and Playboy models.

Apocalypse is a psychedelic opera that has lost its logic, in which napalm smells beautiful in the morning and the waves invite surfing. An opulent masterpiece now in a royal format, which will push the rest of the film year far into the shadow of the Cambodian temple.