Written by Andreas Babiolakis

This review is a part of the Palme d’Or Project: a review of every single Palme d’Or winner at Cannes Film Festival. Apocalypse Now won the twenty fourth Palme d’Or at the 1979 festival, which it shared with The Tin Drum.

The film was selected by the following jury.
Jury President: Françoise Sagan.
Jury: Sergio Amidei, Rodolphe-Maurice Arlaud, Luis Garcia Berlanga, Maurice Bessy, Paul Claudon, Jules Dassin, Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Susannah York.

This is the end… beautiful friend.
This is the end… my only friend. The end.

Sometimes life imitates art, and the final film of Francis Ford Coppola's four project suite of perfection (including both Godfathers and The Conversation), Apocalypse Now, definitely plays into this theory. Maybe he felt like the young Captain Willard: being tossed back into the thick of things by the film industry as he tries to forage his way out without losing his sanity. After you watch Hearts of Darkness (a documentary of the production of this film), you’ll see he was possibly more like Colonel Kurtz: with his expectations and tenacity to get even the most absurd requests done. No matter how you feel about Coppola and the shoot for Apocalypse Now, you’ll definitely see that the behemoth that the film became wasn’t necessarily what was planned. Coppola discusses his desire to make his blockbuster action flick during Hearts of Darkness, as if this was his answer to Jaws or Star Wars. Apocalypse Now couldn’t be further from those. You get sucked into the aforementioned works and find some fun and adventure. No one wants to stay in the nihilistic nightmare that is Apocalypse Now, and that’s precisely the point. Besides, as good as those films by Coppola’s friends and contemporaries (Spielberg and Lucas) are, Apocalypse Now is better. A harder watch, sure, but better.

Most anti-war films dive into the madness of broken veteran minds, but Apocalypse Now starts in this place, with Willard having to be the shattered soul sent back to war. He’s on a bender and clearly unfit to fight, but his nation needs him during the Vietnam War. He arrives on site and is surrounded by disillusioned newbies that are ready to defend their country’s honour. Oh, the little they know (or so says Willard’s constant shrugging of these circumstances). The deeper into the shit we go, the less exciting it is for everyone else, who eventually want to turn back and go home (if their brains are even functioning enough to feel these ways). Not Willard, however, who is irreparable. He’s been asked to find the treasonous Colonel Kurtz, and so that’s what he will do, even if it kills him. To watch Apocalypse Now is to spot a descent into madness, and you will feel drained before we even get started. That’s some powerful anti-war rhetoric right there.

Apocalypse Now is furiously tangerine and muddy, as if it were drenched in the napalm and dirt that are quite visible on screen for a good majority of the film; these colours still exist outside of scenes of combat. The entire film feels washed out, like a fever dream or a reoccurring traumatic memory. You can’t place your finger on specifics, but the general stress and panic is felt throughout. Coppola is very good at making sure you feel uncomfortable throughout the entire film, so having “The End” by The Doors famously bookend this film brings this hysteria full circle. We begin with a vision of a napalm shower to the song, and you feel instant doom. Perhaps you’ve had some existential dread lately (lord knows I sure have), and the opening shot extrapolates that out of us. We are uncertain. We are afraid of death looking over our shoulder. Should we be digging deeper and deeper into these Vietnamese jungles? We start off with red flags telling us to turn back now, and yet we are about to invest many hours into biting off more than we can chew.

This quest to find Colonel Kurtz (a deserter that has gone senile and started his own civilization as some sort of God figure) becomes personal for Willard, as if he is going to kill the part of himself attached to war; he will either die trying, or will be sent home for good for completing this mission (he hopes). Kurtz himself is also beyond gone and seemingly trying to find humanity in any place that he can. His quest attracts a lot of local attention, and Kurtz is deemed enlightened. His final words (“The horror… The horror…”) are a final reminder of the hideousness of humanity: the very kind that had Kurtz killing his own species, and the kind that had him as sacrificial as a ceremonial cow. Where does the killing of one another end? Was Kurtz actually harming his country being away from it? Did he actually become the enemy?

Humans are simple as beings of flesh, and the carnage in Apocalypse Now reminds us of this all too much. However, the human mind is incredibly fascinating with the amount it can endure (as well as the different ways it breaks to try and preserve its host body during crises). Everyone in Apocalypse Now has killing on the brain, whether it’s to protect yourself., die in battle by trying to defend your country, or to self sabotage via addictions or other pugnacious rituals. Jim Morrison finishes his Oedipus opus “The End” by repeating the word “kill” again and again. In Apocalypse Now, this complex is more than alive with men killing men and themselves: sons killing fathers and fathers killing sons, with sons and fathers also killing each other. Generations old and new being terminated. Apocalypse now.

The firefights may look like fireworks and the Odyssean descent may be narratively exquisite, but Apocalypse Now is as ugly as a masterful epic can be. That’s the main draw for the many lovers of the film since it’s release: you’ll never find apathy to be this gorgeous in any other large scaled release. Individuals have their own descriptions of joy within dismal conditions: a leader falls in love with surfing during a strike because these are optimal conditions to him; a grown man is reverted back to infantile conditions because it was his brain’s only way out of reality; a vagabond finds genius within Kurtz’ hidden society because there’s nothing identifiable to home here. As much as Apocalypse Now is an onslaught in a literal war time sense, it’s also the deconstruction and destruction of self. This includes how the film is self aware of its genre conventions and how it can either exploit or detonate them.

There isn’t a war film like Apocalypse Now, because there isn’t really a film like it at all. Coppola was inspired by Aguirre, the Wrath of God, but the only semblance of Herzog’s classic here is the fixation on the deranged men in power over the rest of us (and how we got there); although the traversing through jungle-land terrains is also a possible result of Aguirre’s influence. Coppola was reportedly wanting to make his blockbuster here, but that didn’t happen in multiple ways. It didn’t make as much money as it should have and was actually considered a bit of a bust, due to how much the film made versus how much it cost (rumour has it that Coppola settled to make The Godfather Part III only to finally recoup what Apocalypse Now lost). Additionally, the film is far too philosophical and poignant to be like the escapist action films Coppola was wanting to channel. Either way, Cannes saw the worth that the world would eventually see in Apocalypse Now: one of the most harrowing, jaw dropping, intelligible epics of all time, where you feast your eyes as much as you cover them, you soul search as much as you seek moral goodness within monstrosities, and you will forever be amazed and horrified at the same time. This may not have been what Coppola initially envisioned, but no one will be able to even plan to pull this off ever again.

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.