Apocalypse Now: Final Cut

Apocalypse Now: Final Cut

We have all heard stories about artists who surreptitiously revised their own paintings in the Louvre possibly apocryphal tales about Cézanne and others. For certain artists, work is never finished. In American movies, two of the most relentless self-revisers are George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, friends and sometimes collaborators, frequently like-minded in changing their minds about some of their signature accomplishments.

“Apocalypse Now” is a film that drove Coppola to both financial ruin and actual madness. The magnificently ambitious grafting of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” onto the historical quagmire of America’s catastrophic military campaign in Vietnam was always a sprawl a maximalist spectacle. The first release was only two-and-a-half hours long, a monolithic psychedelic horror vision of will and inhumanity called “the movie that destroyed movie journalism.”

“Apocalypse Now Redux,” released in 2001, was three hours and 20 minutes long more diffuse than its predecessor but even more thematically and narratively incoherent, as well as mostly galvanically hallucinatory. And now we have “Apocalypse Now Final Cut,” which clocks at just under three hours again. It’s also a 4K restoration from original negative with newly remastered sound; if you’re going to see it (and you should) you ought to see it in a theater that’s optimized for Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos.

At a Q&A after a press screening this week one of the Zoetrope tech guys told the story of how Coppola actually approached then-Universal head Lew Wasserman and asked to “borrow” (Coppola did air quotes) the Sensurround technology Universal used for “Earthquake.” Sensing an opportunity for revenue Wasserman offered Coppola outright rights to the technology for $1 million cash upfront except Coppola didn’t have $1 million.

But. With Dolby Atmos, the sound wizards have devised a soundtrack that does, indeed in the properly kitted-out theater, rumble your seat. It’s both preposterous and awe-inspiring. And yes the picture restoration has both healthy grain and increased heft in the color.

But as good as it looks sounds feels, this cut expands upon and unpeels the movie’s weaknesses as story and meditation on Vietnam. It eviscerates I mean chops out completely the ghoulish morbid sex-with-the-Playmates scene. Yet retains Kilgore’s stolen surfboard, keeps French Plantation scene except for most of Robert Duvall’s monologue about “Charlie.”

Some movie fans complain that the early scene shouldn’t be in any cut, because it shows Martin Sheen’s Willard grinning like a frat boy as he gets up to hijinks with the other guys on the PT boat crew “humanizes” him too much. You could just as easily argue that it rounds him out, but my problem with it is that it just drops a plot point without caring about its resolution something the first version of the movie did a smidge too often.

The French Plantation scene does have some good things going for it. It’s spooky and tense and sensuous, like a wide-screen color collaboration between Luchino Visconti and Val Lewton. And it’s interesting in terms of real-world movie semiotics; Aurore Clemente met Coppola’s longtime collaborator Dean Tavoularis on the set, and they later married.

One of the decaying Frenchmen is played by Christian Marquand, who was once one of Brando’s closest friends (it was as a favor to Marquand that Brando appeared as the guru in the artistic and box office disaster “Candy,” which Marquand directed). But this scene adds no coherence to an already wildly spinning story; in fact, it adds to its incoherence. It’s also really the only scene that tries to come to grips with the narrative of Vietnam, the reality of colonialism. And it can only deal with those topics at all imaginatively simply with an egg metaphor so worn-out it comes pretty close to being offensive. That much-underlined still underscores other ways that “Apocalypse Now” fails as a consideration of Vietnam.

Adapting Heart of Darkness means finding analogs for Conrad’s Congolese; bringing in Vietnam’s indigenous people to stand for them is historically inaccurate and indulges in movie-savage clichés that were grotesque when they were new-ish in silent cinema. The Montagnard is a misapprehension in the movie; Michael Herr’s narration remains a noble attempt to balance the film’s phantasmagoria with some authentic grunt perspective. And of course the business with the “fucking puppy” still makes me roll my eyes.

And yet the movie still dazzles, and contains some real nuggets of philosophical provocation. It doesn’t answer the question “Why are/were we in Vietnam,” but what Western work of art or reportage truly has? As for “Why did Francis Ford Coppola go into the jungles of the Philippines, endangering himself and everyone around him?” this film answers it definitively. It’s the only question the film can really answer, after all.

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