Redux probes humanity, Vietnam War

Apocalypse Now Redux opens with helicopters, jungle and napalm surreally muted by the voice of Jim Morrison of The Doors singing, "This is the end ..." Those words and the surrealism presage the themes and mood of the film and foreshadow its feel of finality when compared to the original Apocalypse Now, which was released in 1979. Redux, with almost an hour of added footage that was cut from the original, expands on and solidifies what the original said about the futility, incongruities, decadence, surrealism and dishonesty that character ized the Vietnam War. The added footage also serves to round out the main characters; the ending, while still the same as in the original, is more satisfying. The film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, has a simple plot - loosely based on Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness - in which Capt. Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) is sent up a winding jungle river into Ca mbodia to assassinate Marlon Brando's character, Col. Walter Kurtz. Kurtz is a rogue officer operating as a demigod to his followers with what the military has deemed "unsound" methods. As Willard and the Navy boat crew - a Louisiana chef named Hicks (Frederic Forrest); Chief Philips (Albert Hall), the boat's commander; a surfer named Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms); and a 17-year-old called Mr. Clean (Laurence Fishburne) - follows the river approaching Kurtz, the characters become more decadent and the situation becomes increasingly surreal. This allows Coppola to create an alternate world within the world of war, causing the audience to forget stereotypes through the more objective, albeit dreamlike, manner. As the movie probes the darkness of the war, it also shows the human tendency towards evil as represented by Kurtz. All of this was present in the original, but Redux more deeply explores Coppola's commentary on the war and the depravity of the human condition. As Willard and the boat crew are escorted to the mouth of the river by armored cavalry, led by a surfing-obsessed Lt. Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall), the incongruous nature of the war is brought to light. The entry site for Willard's boat is chosen because of the good surf at the beachhead. The soldiers destroy the village, but the villagers are told, over a loudspeaker as a tank-mounted flamethrower torches a building, that the soldiers are there to help them. As the crew progresses up the river towards Kurtz, the crew's decadence increases as their chief's authority crumbles. This is made much more clear in Redux by a scene that was left out in the original in which the crew arrives at a remote, leaderless Medivac camp deluged by a monsoon. The pervasive lack of authority quickly seeps into the men like the rain into the ankle-deep mud, and a fight breaks out that the chief not only cannot stop but cannot avoid being pulled into himself. The scene progresses as Willard bargains some of the group's fuel for sexual favors from stranded and decidedly unglamorous Playboy Playmates who were seen earlier in the film as entertainment for the soldiers at a morale-boosting show that quickly degene rated into a melee when uncontrolled soldiers rushed the stage. The sodden romp at the Medivac base shows the unsophisticated desperation of the crew and Playmates. As they tried to make the surroundings similar to what they remembered from home, the less like home, or anything else for that matter, things seemed. After seeing either of the films, one cannot help but be impressed at Coppola's depiction of the Vietnam War's futility. In the first version, futility is mostly shown through individual soldier's impotent struggles to survive and remain sane in the midst of insane conflict. In Redux, the theme is expanded to show the futility of the entire war. For example, in an entirely new scene on a French plantation far up the river, Willard is thrust into a political discussion in which he is told that America's ideal of fighting the spread of communism to Vietnam is the "biggest nothing in history." The new scenes also do much to round out the characters of Willard and Kurtz. Willard is easily seduced by a woman at the French plantation who points out that he, much like humanity, has two sides: one loving and one destructive. A more rational side of Kurtz, as well as the dishonesty that pervaded the war, is shown in an added scene where the colonel reads excerpts from a Time magazine story that says the prospects of the war are improving, while the imprisoned Willard listens and knows the war is not improving. As a whole, Redux makes the same statements about humanity and the Vietnam War that the original did; it just makes them with more force and without making them seem forced. It accomplishes the portrayal of the war as psychologically surreal, futile on every level, physically and morally dirty and decadent to the core. It provides valuable insight into a war that most students are too young to have experienced firsthand. This must be the Apocalypse Now Coppola originally had in mind, but felt too constrained by length, time and money pressures to release in 1979. Apocalypse Now Redux is now playing at Downtown Cinema West. Rating: A