'Apocalypse': Once More, With Extra Footage

THE WAR portrayed in "Apocalypse Now" was, of course, the one in Vietnam. But the real war was always producer-co-writer-director Francis Ford Coppola's pitched battle against, well, everything.

He was the mad general, hellbent on creating a masterpiece despite momentous setbacks: hurricanes that destroyed many of his sets in the Philippines, a budget that hemorrhaged from $16 million to upwards of $30 million, a star (Martin Sheen) who suffered a heart attack, and an overweight, grossly unprepared star (Marlon Brando) who often threatened to quit and seemed to be making up his role as he went along.

Coppola famously said: "We made 'Apocalypse' the way Americans made war in Vietnam. There were too many of us, too much money and equipment and, little by little, we went insane."

And while Coppola weathered these and other problems (from intense drug use to a tottering marriage), the muses were maddeningly elusive. Coppola could never come up with an ending that brought his vision to a shatteringly brilliant conclusion.

That ending remains MIA.

Coppola had just made both "Godfather" movies and "The Conversation," arguably the most brilliant cinematic hat trick in American modern cinema. Yet the possibility of a monumental failure threatened him every day.

Despite the fact that it made money, shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes and earned eight Oscar nominations (it won two), there has always been a pall of artistic failure over the movie. As if Coppola had never quite nailed it.

"Apocalypse Now Redux," which contains about 50 minutes of extra footage, is Coppola's final artistic assault. This is the one where he honors his vision – or clears his name, whichever way you look at it.

Does he do it? Perhaps the first thing to get out of your mind when watching this "Apocalypse," or the 1979 version, is worrying about whether the film's a success or failure. It's both. The more you see of "Apocalypse," the more obvious its triumphs and mistakes.

A quick recap of the story: Capt. Benjamin Willard (Sheen), a burnout case, is sent by the top military brass to track down the renegade Col. Walter E. Kurtz (Brando), who has created a private army and kingdom for himself in Cambodia. Willard's mission, as the well-known phrase goes, is to "terminate with extreme prejudice." He is to take a boat upriver, tell no one of the purpose of his mission and kill Kurtz.

What is added? There is extra footage within existing scenes, here and there. But the most obvious additions are two new scenes. One is a dreamlike visit to a plantation (it's enshrouded with fog, which means Not Real), in which Willard has dinner with a circle of mystical French colonists who lecture him and, by extension, America, about the futility of fighting in Vietnam.

The second is a scene in which a group of Playboy Bunnies are grounded because their chopper is out of fuel. Willard and his boat detail barter some fuel for a little private time with the girls.

Neither scene adds anything but narrative dead weight to the movie. The plantation scene, which includes a strangely unappealing love scene between Aurore Clement and Sheen, makes its French characters seem like fussy fools – more in keeping with the joke Frenchmen in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" than evocative ghosts of Vietnam's yesteryear.

And the Playboy Bunnies sequence, which seems to be about the sexual exploitation of the time, doesn't shed any particular light. The scene is just indicative that nutty things happened in 'Nam, thematic repetition rather than narrative evolution.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle Coppola faced was the sheer weight of the movie's concept. Co-writer John Milius wanted to make "Apocalypse" into a modern version of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." A cool idea, until someone had to film the thing: How hard it is to make a masterpiece when you set out to make a masterpiece by appropriating another masterpiece.

Ultimately, "Apocalypse Now," "Redux" or otherwise, is about one crazy boat ride through Vietnam, where really weird things happen. Whenever the movie reaches for Conradian or Odyssean heft, it is forced to lean on Willard's narration (written by Michael Herr), which puts the movie in the awkward position of explaining itself.

I'm going on about the weaknesses because they're interesting to isolate. But if you haven't seen "Apocalypse," or even if you have, you owe it to yourself to see (or see again) its undeniably great things. The opening, a doomsday scene of silhouetted helicopters, carpet-bombing as the Doors song "The End" plays, is one of the great movie beginnings. There's a magnificent sequence – almost Kubrickian – in which Lt. Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall, in the movie's best performance) orders the carpet-bombing of a strip of jungle so he can use the beach for a little surfing. Then, of course, there's the original Playboy Bunnies sequence (a much better thematic use of these models), in which the Hefner chicks are helicoptered down before a crowd of pent-up, testosteronal soldiers. Almost immediately, the women have to escape because of the ensuing pandemonium.

As for the finale, in which Willard finally encounters Kurtz with the help of a gonzo photographer (Dennis Hopper), it's mesmerizing, thanks to Brando's high-wire-act method acting and Vittoria Storaro's outstanding cinematography. But the script is dismayingly banal, especially the newly added footage. Now, Kurtz talks more about the futility of war, and the immorality and hypocrisy of the Pentagon, even reading from a newsmagazine to make a point. This makes him seem more like a tubby college professor reaching for class handouts than the dark lord he's meant to be. Yet you still watch with interest. Such is Marlon Brando. And who can ever forget his immortal cry of anguish: "The horror, the horror"?

Perhaps the most ironic and telling moment for me is when Willard arrives in Vietnam amid the confusion of battle. Right in the middle of the melee, a documentary film crew is shooting.

"Don't look into the camera, don't look into the camera!" yells the director, who happens to be Coppola. And in that moment, you can see what "Apocalypse" is all about: a filmmaker desperately searching for something great, but never quite finding it.

APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX (R, 173 minutes) – Contains bloodshed, drug use, obscenity, sexual scenes and nudity. At the Cineplex Odeon Cinema.