So, here we are finally, at my number one. Thanks everybody who has been following this, I hope you enjoyed my write-ups as much as I did writing them and reliving the films in my head as I went. This one is very special to me and I hope my write-up will shed some light on the why.
Not sure how you can't rank Apocalypse Now as the greatest 'nam era war film though, so I'll say that's still to come.
You're right, I can't. In fact:
1. Apocalypse Now (1979)Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
Featuring: Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen & Robert Duvall
"The horror... the horror.." And as I heard those words when the screen turned to black, I realised I had just seen the best film that has ever been made. There is no contest, out of everything I have seen, no film comes close to the magnitude of absolute brilliance that this film is. After Platoon, this is the real film that started my love for Vietnam films. I must have been 15 the first time I watched it and I didn't even watch all of it. I jumped in about halfway at the amazing Wagner-sequence. For those who haven't seen it; this film takes the bombastic qualities of Richard Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' to a whole new level and has been cited often as being some of the best parts of the film. But let's be frank, this film has no best part, in the same way that it doesn't have a weak part AT ALL. At almost 2.5 hours, the length is very daunting and the 'Redux' version is even longer, clocking in at over 200 minutes, but even that one doesn't have you lose interest in the slightest. To me, what makes this movie stand out (apart from really everything) is the way it is filmed, the way the story is told, the atmosphere it creates and the way it left me after I had seen it in full for the first time. Scenes that explicitly do this very well are the opening scene, the Wagner sequence, the Do-Lung bridge scene and the final 10-15 minutes.
So, before commenting more on what is good about this film, let me first explain what the hell this is from people who have never seen it. Apocalypse now is (yet another) Vietnam film, but one that is VERY different (yet again) from the other three that have been on my list. The gist of it is simple; US Army Captain Ben Willard (Martin Sheen) gets orders to follow the river Nung into the neutral Cambodia to kill the rogue US Army Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who is leading his own army of Montagnard (French for 'mountain folk', the indigenous people of Vietnam) troops and has supposedly gone crazy. Willard starts following the river on a boat with a group of other soldiers and his trip to Cambodia is what's depicted in the film. Along the way, Willard and his crew encounter various different things, which all have one thing in common; people are completely going crazy and they are getting more and more crazy the further the head down the river, with its pinnacle at the scenes involving the Do-Lung bridge, which is in my opinion one of the strongest movie scenes I have ever seen regarding the utter helplessness of the young people waging a war against their enemies, but far more notably, against themselves. This film doesn't show a war against the Vietcong as much, but more so the inner battle against darkness inside the US army and this scene in particular represents a turning point for our main character, who up until then had been fairly ignorant or neutral about whatever he saw, but as we get closer to the end (and the end is where it really happens), Willard, like every other person encountered earlier, turns into a monster.
And this brings me to the following; I personally believe this film isn't showing us a war, it's merely using this as a backdrop to show the viewer the loss of humanity in the face of war. The more he enters the jungle and the further down the river he goes, the people he encounters lose their morals and judgement and I think this film portrays this principle very, very well and it is what makes the ending so strikingly amazing, yet utterly unbelievable. The ending can not be watched without having seen the rest of the film, in order to fully understand the impact it will have on you as you watch it, after having seen all this terrible, psychologically gruesome stuff before. To judge a film based on its ending and its ending alone isn't what I'm trying to do here and while I will say it's brilliant and my favourite ending to any film ever, it's once again the road that leads up to there that makes it as great as it is. I honestly can not imagine ever seeing a film again in my life that will strike me in such a way as this film has done to me. It's, again, not one I watch often and it's one you should take the time for to immerse yourself in it, but this film gave me not only a new outlook on film as a whole, it also managed to jump right to the spot of undoubted favourite film ever. Not a shot or scene is wasted here and everything has a purpose. Numerous people have analysed this film and its scenes and everything is in there for a reason and there's nothing I would change about the entire thing. More so than with any other film on this list, I implore you to watch this very soon, if you haven't yet.
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Thanks, once more, for reading!
Topic: Top 20 Films/Movies Thread - Up now: toro (Page 25) (Read 77155 times)
