Apocolypse Now Redux

I like it. I like the French Plantation scene, as I've written before, I think he goes back there because that woman is the only one who truly understood him.

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I prefer Redux and I know I'm in the minority - it adds a lot of depth and context. I'll admit that it slows the movie down, but I'm for that in a movie of this scope.

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I do too. It does slow the movie down, but it also gives the movie a more powerful epic feel.

And the scene with the bunnies in the village during the monsoon was easily as disturbing/haunting as any part of the theatrical cut. In some ways, more. Came away from that feeling the full effect of the alienation and man's inhumanity to man that characterizes the film.

I've never seen the original version, only the Redux. It's one of the three or four greatest movies I've ever seen.

I am puzzled by the fact that the French plantation would not have been in the original version. To me, that scene is pivotal for understanding what the movie is really trying to say.

***spoilers***

Apocalypse Now is an indictment of the American method of warfighting in Vietnam (and the method which we have continued to use in basically every war since). The film asks, what is war, and how should it be fought? What effect does it have on those who participate in it?

The short answer to those questions, of course, is Kurtz.

The long answer is given by the encounters Willard and the crew of the river boat have as they make their way up the Mekong. Kilgore and the Air Cavalry represent the way American tried to go about fighting the war: from a distance, clean, indiscriminant, and made for television. It is also, as Kilgore himself inadvertently tells us, completely ineffective. They have to continually clear out the same villages over and over because they don't actually accomplish anything. They are only playing at war, while their enemy, although far behind technologically, is dead earnest about it.

The second major encounter is at the base. The girlie show there represents what American military leadership expects from its troops: it wants to engage their base, primal, animal instincts for the purpose of making war, but at the same time it expects them to keep themselves within strictly controlled boundaries. The troops breaking through the barrier and mobbing the bunnies is a demonstration of how those two things are incompatible with each other - you cannot expect a man to be both a man and an animal.

The third encounter is at the bridge at night. This shows the inevitable outcome of the American method of war. There is no clear objective. Men huddle in the dark, get high, and fire at shadows, afraid of an enemy that seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Each day the Americans build the bridge, and each night the enemy tears it back down. Nothing is accomplished except for loss of life.

The bridge also represents the boundary of civilization. Beyond is a land peopled by literal savages. It is a world where the enemy is at home, but the crew of the river boat is either killed or driven crazy by the experience. Only Willard, who we know is more at ease with the savage side of himself, seems unaffected.

It is within this setting that the encounter at the French Plantation takes place. In the movie's narrative it seems jarringly out-of-place - a bizarre episode of normalcy in a world of bloodlust and savagery. But the purpose of the scene is not to fit seamlessly into the story. It is intended to be jarring, because the message is that this is the kind of war America thinks it can fight. American military leadership thought (and still thinks) that it could fight a "civilized" war against a savage enemy, when in reality, the idea of a civilized war should be as incongruent as a French plantation in the middle of the Vietnam War. War is a savage repudiation of everything civilization represents, and to be successful at it, you must become savage.

Kurtz knows this. That is the realization that he has come to and that the brass wants to wipe out. He has become the ultimate savage, a civilized man who has knowingly thrown off the restrictions of civilization. That is why some of his final lines are him reading an article about American servicemen being censured for writing the word "frick" on bombs that they intend to use to kill people. His point could not be more clear.

I love this movie.