Francis Ford Coppola’s stunning journey into the madness of the Vietnam War is one of the most ambitious and cinematic films ever made.
Inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now follows US Army assassin Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) as he travels up the Nung River in search of his target, the insane American war hero Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has made himself the self-appointed ruler of a band of native warriors living deep within the jungle.
As famous for the wild mythology around its epic, troubled, production as it is for the film itself, many had expected that Apocalypse Now would never be finished. Its surprise debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979 would yield the Palme ‘d’Or, and unveiled the most daring of all the films made in the New Hollywood era. With incredible turns from Sheen and Brando, memorable cameos by Dennis Hopper and Robert Duvall, and unforgettable imagery, Apocalypse Now is a film like no other, and is a scabrous condemnation of the madness of war and empire.
Coppola would twice return to the editing room in the intervening decades, in search of the ultimate version of his magnum opus. Eventually settling on this, Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, in 2019, this is the ultimate version of one of cinema’s wildest odysseys.