The end is near.

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) 

“I wish I had words, man,” says a fidgety Dennis Hopper who plays a photojournalist entranced by the maniacal thwarted brilliance of Col. Kurtz. And perhaps the whole experience of Apocalypse Now is just that — one where you are at a loss with words, and yes brilliance. Clearly, no war film has ever came this close to the face of horror. The setting is Vietnam war, or rather the US involvement to end Communism in the far east. Horror looms.

Fresh from the war itself, Capt. Willard hesitantly takes on a mission to exterminate with ‘extreme prejudice’ Col. Kurtz, a highly revered ex Green Berets officer played with reserved gusto by the incomparable Marlon Brando. Col. Kurtz has reportedly killed Viet intelligentsia and has sought asylum in the Cambodian jungles creating a tribe of his own.

Willard backed by a group of American soldiers — with the all-too-familiar war jitters — traverse the murky, often boring, Ng River, passing what seemed to be jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia. But the coconut palms could only smell of a familiar place — yes Apocalypse Now was shot in the Philippines. From the onset of the mission to their eventual confrontation, Willard’s sojourn is punctuated by memorable and harrowing scenes: a colonel slipping in death cards on throngs of cadavers while helicopters are bombing a Viet village, a river massacre of what turned out to be innocent people, a Playboy playmates concert swarmed by raging testosterones.

Martin Sheen plays Willard, when he still looked like Charlie. A young Lawrence Fishburne is cast among one of Willard’s crew. A young and unattractive Harrison Ford appears briefly during the opening scenes. Coppola himself turns out as a director of sorts filming the bombings perpetrated by the ballistic military leader Col. Kilgore played by Robert Duvall.

In the Redux edition, Coppola added an hour of deleted footages — more scenes during the river travel and more dialogue in the concluding scenes with Brando which supposedly shed light to an analysis of his character and the justifications of what might seemed a blurry ending.. I haven’t seen the Redux edition, but Redux or not, Apocalypse Now will not only be remembered as a meditation on war and its toll, but a landmark in filmmaking that will forever be etched in the history of cinema.