Apocalypse Now

With his depiction of the war in Vietnam, Coppola managed to show all of the influences that slowly turned a regular man into a deranged madman. The dark aura built around Colonel Walter E. Kurtz is entrancing and Coppola’s style of gradually revealing his personality is just perfect. Also equally perfect is Marlon Brando himself who in his acting shaves the essence of man down to the marrow in his acting. Martin Sheen as Captain Willard superbly captured the transformation of a person scarred by war. His dilemma and inability to live as before. A breathtaking experience. A masterpiece. (12/01/2006)

This isn't a film about war, it's a braving foray into the hell of the human soul into the backdrop of Vietnam. Like Conrad's Marlowe in Heart of Darkness, Coppola's Willard travels down the river in purgatory to find hell at the end of it. The apocalypse is conceived as a sequence of diverse stories that illuminate horror from different angles. Horror is the key word in the film. It doesn't matter if it's horror from the point of view of reed warblers or the French... it's the same horror Kurtz embodied in his apocalyptic and pagan-brutal encampment. It's the same horror that's been eating Willard since the beginning... Emptiness. The removal of humanity. Coppola's film is shot in an almost cynical tone. Absurdity often evokes Heller's Catch-22 with its power... Despite the runtime the gradation is amazing... I didn't find a weak spot. Every shot, every speech, every sound creates a riveting picture of horror on the bloody canvas of the Vietnamese jungle – suffering, loss of humanity, loss of self. I'm reluctant to write that Apocalypse Now is a metaphor. No, it's eerily literal and explicit. It is a direct image that impacts through all the means used. A masterful film in every way. In terms of suggestiveness, I don't know of any stronger war films. The actors have an incredibly naturalistic feel – crazy Brando, crazy Sheen... as if hell had consumed them. Apocalypse Now is masterful in the sense that while it says much about the nature of the Vietnam conflict, its impact is universal. It reveals something from the darkness of the human soul... And as for the oft-mentioned unfinished plot... can anything be said that still lasts? Coppola's Apocalypse Now doesn't end with headlines... in the film world, maybe. (02/04/2005)

I was excited about this movie, I was looking forward to it for a long time. And it didn't disappoint me at all. I saw the director's cut, which is extra long, but it's worth it. This is a beautiful example of war madness, which turns into a journey into the depths of the human soul. Dark, incredibly dark with great performances and captivating direction. (11/19/2015)

A perfectly apt title for one of the most intense and memorable films about the Vietnam War. The iconic Martin Sheen as Captain Willard is subjected to what is essentially a double apocalypse in a hard-to-describe atmosphere of Vietnamese hell that at times resembles surreal imagery. For, apart from the external dangers, he is forced to face a stiff internal battle with himself to save not only his neck but also his sanity. Martin Sheen's acting, with his expression often oscillating precisely between total madness and fickle sanity, is simply phenomenal. Art-wise, Apocalypse Now is a total triumph (especially on an OLED TV in UHD), and the surfing sequence with Robert Duvall will probably stay with me forever. (10/27/2020)

Conrad's “Heart of Darkness” is one of those timeless books, and it's not bad at all. It is all the more remarkable that Coppola's adaptation does not fall short in any respect, it even surpasses it in many ways. At least in the director's cut, it is an equally riveting probe through the darkness of the soul and madness. (09/14/2006)