Apocalypse Now |
Coppola took Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's enigmatic story about the cruelties of colonialism, and turned it into a 20th-century fable about neocolonialism in which the story's eminently sane narrator, Marlow, becomes Captain Willard, the Special Services hitman, as crazy as his assigned quarry, Colonel Kurtz. The difference is that unlike everyone else around him, from the top brass down, Willard knows he's mad. Everything about the Taliban, al-Qaida, the pressures that took us into Afghanistan and Iraq, the assault on Abbottabad and the deadly troubles that lie ahead are to be found here in Willard's journey. It's a work of genius that may falter a little towards the end, though not fatally. This newly released version is more or less the one shown at Cannes and is definitive. The half-hour of material introduced 10 years ago inApocalypse Now Redux is of no value, it diminishes the film and is to be avoided.
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