Stars: Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms, Dennis Hopper, Tom Mason

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Summary: Francis Ford Coppola's masterful film about the moral madness of the Vietnam War was inspired by Joseph Conrad's novella, HEART OF DARKNESS. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is sent into the Cambodian jungle to "terminate with extreme prejudice" Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has become insane and now runs his own fiefdom. Traveling downriver on a patrol boat, Willard encounters an air cavalry commander, Lt. Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), whose love of war is matched only by his love of surfing. Coppola almost went bankrupt and Sheen suffered a heart attack during the making of the film, but the rigorous shoot paid off in this unforgettable film.

Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam epic, loosely based on HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad, tells the story of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), a special agent sent into Cambodia to assassinate an errant American colonel (Marlon Brando). Willard is assigned a navy patrol boat operated by Chief (Albert Hall) and three hapless soldiers (Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms, and Larry Fishburne). They are escorted on part of their journey by an air cavalry unit led by Lt. Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), a gung-ho commander with a love of Wagner, surfing, and napalm. After witnessing a surreal USO show featuring Playboy playmates and an anarchic battle with the Viet Cong at a bridge, Willard reaches Colonel Kurtz's compound. A crazed photo journalist and Kurtz groupie (Dennis Hopper) welcomes the crew, and Willard begins to question his orders to 'terminate the colonel's command.'

The gruelling production and Coppola's insistence on authenticity led to vast budget overruns and physical and emotional breakdowns, as detailed in the fascinating documentary HEARTS OF DARKNESS shot by Coppola's wife, Eleanor. Considered to be one of the best war movies of all time, APOCALYPSE NOW features incredible performances (especially those of Sheen, Brando and a then 14-year-old Fishburne) and beautifully chaotic visuals (courtesy of renowned cinematographer Vittorio Storao) that make it an absolute must-see.

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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 onto 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 gun-ships 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 his wife, Eleanor) informs every scene and every frame, and the result is a film for the ages. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Collector's Edition Steelbook
Year:	1979
Release Date:	August 25, 2008
Runtime:	147 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	B U A 0076601
Keywords:	War, Now, Apocalypse, Wide, Screen
Genre:	War