Apocalypse Now (1979) USA
Apocalypse Now Image Cover
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Director:Francis Ford Coppola
Studio:Paramount
Producer:Francis Ford Coppola, Kim Aubry
Writer:John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola
Rating:4.5
Rated:R
Date Added:2007-03-05
Purchased On:2007-05-03
ASIN:6305609705
UPC:0097360230642
Price:$29.98
Awards:Won 2 Oscars. Another 13 wins & 32 nominations
Genre:Harrison Ford
Release:2006-08-14
IMDb:0078788
Duration:153
Picture Format:Widescreen
Aspect Ratio:2.35:1
Sound:Dolby
Languages:English, Dolby Digital 5.1, Commentary by Francis Ford Coppola (both films), Dolby Digital 2.0
Subtitles:English, Spanish
Features:Anamorphic
Francis Ford Coppola  ...  (Director)
John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola  ...  (Writer)
 
Sam Bottoms  ...  Lance B. Johnson
Marlon Brando  ...  Colonel Walter E. Kurtz
Bo Byers  ...  MP Sergeant #1
Colleen Camp  ...  
Robert Duvall  ...  Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore
Laurence Fishburne  ...  Tyrone 'Clean' Miller
Harrison Ford  ...  Colonel Lucas
Frederic Forrest  ...  Jay 'Chef' Hicks
Scott Glenn  ...  Lieutenant Richard M. Colby
Albert Hall  ...  Chief Phillips
Dennis Hopper  ...  Photojournalist
James Keane  ...  Kilgore's Gunner
Tom Mason  ...  
Ron McQueen  ...  
Kerry Rossall  ...  Mike from San Diego
Martin Sheen  ...  Captain Benjamin L. Willard
G.D. Spradlin  ...  General Corman
Cynthia Wood  ...  
Jerry Ziesmer  ...  Jerry, Civilian
Comments: The Horror. . . The Horror. . .

Summary: In the tradition of such obsessively driven directors as Erich von Stroheim and Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola approached the production of Apocalypse Now as if it were his own epic mission into the heart of darkness. On location in the storm-ravaged Philippines, he quite literally went mad as the project threatened to devour him in a vortex of creative despair, but from this insanity came one of the greatest films ever made. It began as a John Milius screenplay, transposing Joseph Conrad's classic story "Heart of Darkness" into the horrors of the Vietnam War, following a battle-weary Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) on a secret upriver mission to find and execute the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has reverted to a state of murderous and mystical insanity. The journey is fraught with danger involving wartime action on epic and intimate scales. One measure of the film's awesome visceral impact is the number of sequences, images, and lines of dialogue that have literally burned themselves into our cinematic consciousness, from the Wagnerian strike of helicopter gunships on a Vietnamese village to the brutal murder of stowaways on a peasant sampan and the unflinching fearlessness of the surfing warrior Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who speaks lovingly of "the smell of napalm in the morning." Like Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God, this film is the product of genius cast into a pit of hell and emerging, phoenix-like, in triumph. Coppola's obsession (effectively detailed in the riveting documentary Hearts of Darkness, directed by Coppola's wife, Eleanor) informs every scene and every frame, and the result is a film for the ages. --Jeff Shannon