synopsis:

'apocalypse now' opens with captain Willard stuck in a hotel room in Saigon, waiting and wishing for a mission. As he narrates the film, he says, "and for my sins they gave me one." He is assigned by General Corman a mission in which he is to track down a renegade colonel (named kurtz) deep in the jungle and "terminate his command". The colonel has a sanctuary in Cambodia where he has an army of Montagnard tribesmen who both worship and despise him.

Willard's journey upriver begins when he boards a Navy PBR (Patrol Boat River) to carry him toward Colonel Kurtz. "The crew were mostly just kids. Rock and rollers with one foot in their graves," he says. Along the way, he studies dossiers on Kurtz and begins to know the man better.

They come upon an attack on a Vietnamese village by the Air Cavalry led by Colonel Kilgore and his unit is supposed to escort them to the mouth of the river. Kilgore seems oblivious to war and seems to look at it as just another job. He only agrees to get the boat into the river after he discovers that the water at the mouth of the river is excellent for surfing. When the helicopters arrive there, they have to destroy another village. This is regarded as one of the best attack sequences ever filmed. As the helicopter force nears the village, they play Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' on loudspeakers on one of the helicopters.

Willard and the boat crew start up the river and you can see Willard's mood change the farther they go, stopping in an army colony where all soldiers are amused by some playboy bunnies. willard realizes that Kurtz has discovered the madness and futility of war like he, too, is discovering. finally they reach kurtz's colony and willard gets tortured, speaks with kurtz and kills him in the end.

The whole movie is a journey toward Willard's understanding of how Kurtz, one of the Army's best soldiers, penetrated the reality of war to such a depth that he could not look any longer without madness and despair.

about this movie:

This movie, starring Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Sam Bottoms, Albert Hall, Larry Fishburne, Fredric Forest, G.

D. Spradlin and Harrison Ford, was inspired by Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', a story narrated by Marlow, who represents a company engaged in the ivory trade in the Congo. As he travels upriver to find the elusive company agent, Kurtz, he becomes more and more consumed by the jungle and begins to think more and more like Kurtz. In 'Apocalypse Now', much the same thing happens to Captain Willard, only now it isn't the late eighteen hundreds, it is the twentieth century and the VietNam war.'apocalypse now' revolves around the idea that War is madness to many. Embodied in one man is the heart of madness and the essence of war. Only within men is the world's true great "Apocolypse" found to exist. In this movie that great Apocolypse is found in the jungle, among the animals, and the savages, in the place where fear dare not to approach and man hopes never to come near.in 2001 a new version, called 'apocalypse now redux' came out, in which Coppola has added 49 minutes, most of them devoted to a visit by the crew to a French plantation, a colonial leftover that somehow survives. At dinner the Americans and French discuss the colonial history of Vietnam, and Willard's eyes meet those of Roxanne, a widow who will spend the night in his arms. Other new footage includes dialogue and byplay on the boat, a second encounter with the Playmates, and additional dialogue by Kurtz.'Apocalypse Now' often takes on mythical proportions, and One of the virtues of the added scenes in the redux-version is that they reveal the original intention of the screenplay, which was to make Willard's journey a loose variation of The 'Odyssey' (see homer). When Kilgore's surfboard is stolen, the scene is analogous to the Cyclops, the Playboy Bunnies are like the Sirens, and at the French Plantation Willard encounters a mysterious widow who is reminiscent of Circe.in 1991 a documentary about the making of 'apocalypse now' came out, called hearts of darkness: a filmmaker's apocalypse. in this documentary you can see the extremely difficult way the movie was shot (due to several money-problems, martin sheen's drugs addiction, etcetera) and the many times the whole project was almost given up.