Apocalypse Now: The Blu Ray Reviewed

Apocalypse Now: Restored Edition
(Blu Ray)
* * * * *

Another retro classic that keeps coming back for one more helicopter swoosh, Apocalypse Now must have been quite an affront to the military industrial complex at the time. The first major American film to deal with the Vietnam War, it came into being when a bearded Italian-American hippie dragged 500 Philippino tribesmen, 300 helicopters, Charlie Sheen’s dad (who was on the verge of heart failure) and Marlon Brando (who was overweight and bald) into the jungle to conjure up the demons of war.

Viewed at the cinema, Apocalypse Now is like a lucid dream, so beautifully photographed that you could freeze frame any second of it and it’d be like a National Geographic pictorial on acid. The actual scenes of apocalypse – from the US bombing of villages to the Hindu ritual slaughtering of a cow – all conspire to make hell on earth look strangely graceful, while Brando himself is always lit from the periphery of the shadows: his face becomes a photographic art in itself.

Needless to say the further down the river we go, the more the futile killings and strung up corpses become part of the scenery, and the viewer is finally left as dazed and hypnotised as the crew on the boat.

On a musical note, kudos goes to Coppola for putting The Doors’ ‘The End’ on the soundtrack: its depiction of a land where “all the children are insane” has never felt quite so appropriate.