7/12/2023 0 Comments Apocalypse now redux![]() ![]() Martin Sheen as Captain Willard plays the jackal to Brando’s lion. Perhaps, Brando is flawless as Kurtz because there is something of Major Kurtz in Brando, but is that not the case in all successful portrayals? Sir Anthony Hopkins might come the closest to approximating Major Kurtz if he could assume that faraway, meditative, and lost look of someone whose soul is already dead but who continues to feed his earthly appetites. Certainly none in the living crop of American actors. As charismatic and dominant a personality as Marlon Brando is (to the extent that sometimes the characters he plays disappear into the actor), you see that nobody else could have believably gotten into the skin of Major Kurtz. It is impossible to imagine anyone else in these roles. The main characters are played as understated as only two giant actors could do to depict the larger-than-life personas on the screen. In the end, they were both wasted by that culture as well as by their own passions or, perhaps, their insanity. It is, on a personal level, the story of two gutsy, extremely sensitive individuals, both initially on the fringes of, and later, outside the culture in which they moved. It is much more than a war film-certainly much more than being the definitive film on the Vietnam war or any other war. The images and the brutal truths were too gripping for me to let go off. At some point in its three-hour run, you may feel you need to take a break from all that intensity. Why a masterpiece? Because it is many things all at once in a series of haunting surreal images that can eat at you from start to finish. I have seen the original non-Redux theater cut before but it wasn’t until I saw this “uncut” version that I can make this assertion. All those fireworks turn me off although I must admit that, on the screen at least, those yellow-orange bursts can be beautiful images when you are spared from seeing flying or writhing bodies or those terrible weapons from which they blast off.Īpocalypse Now Redux is a masterpiece. ![]() I have never been quite as affected by a film as I have been with this one and I am not especially fond of military/war movies. I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now Redux recently. Why is a review of Apocalypse Now in this book site? Simple explanation: The protagonists of my new novel, Hello, My Love! talk about this film.
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