Coppola's Vietnam epic. The production was the war.
Captain Benjamin Willard, a U.S. Army Special Forces officer, is assigned by military intelligence to travel up a river into Cambodia and 'terminate with extreme prejudice' Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, a decorated Green Beret who has gone insane, set himself up as a god to a local population, and is conducting his own private war. Willard boards a Navy patrol boat with a small crew. The film follows the upriver journey.
The film is adapted, loosely, from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, transposed from late-1890s Belgian Congo to late-1960s Vietnam. The journey upriver is also a journey progressively further from any moral coherence the U.S. military still possesses. The film closes inside Kurtz's compound, surrounded by severed heads.
Apocalypse Now's production is itself one of the most-discussed in cinema history. Filmed in the Philippines starting in March 1976, the shoot ran 238 days against a planned 24-week schedule. A typhoon destroyed the sets. Martin Sheen had a heart attack mid-shoot at 36. Marlon Brando arrived overweight and unprepared; Coppola rewrote Kurtz's scenes around his appearance. The Philippine government rented helicopters to the production and recalled them periodically to fight an actual insurgency.
Coppola financed the overrun personally, mortgaging his house. His 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness, directed by his wife Eleanor, is one of the best behind-the-scenes documentaries ever made and the canonical reference for the experience of a production going wrong at scale. The film is in some sense about the production that made it.
The mid-film helicopter assault on a Vietnamese village, led by Robert Duvall's Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore with Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries blaring from external loudspeakers, is the most-imitated war sequence of the modern era. The choice to combine Wagner with helicopter gunfire is, on its face, indefensible — and the film knows it. Kilgore is the film's most charismatic character and one of its clearest moral indictments.
Duvall's performance as Kilgore is the film's most-quoted ('I love the smell of napalm in the morning'). The performance works because Duvall plays the character as a man entirely without doubt — a true believer in the joy of his own work — and the film lets the joy be visible. The audience is meant to see why people who shouldn't be in command end up in command.
Marlon Brando's Kurtz is one of the most-discussed late-career performances in American cinema. Brando arrived in the Philippines having read neither the Conrad novel nor the screenplay. He was several hundred pounds overweight. Coppola decided to shoot him in heavy shadow, often in voice-over and close-up only, to obscure his physical state and emphasise the character's interiority.
The result is a Kurtz who exists more as voice than as body — a disembodied set of monologues about the moral logic of total war. 'The horror, the horror' is taken directly from Conrad. The film's original ending had Kurtz killed in a stylised inter-cut sequence; the Redux cut, restored in 2001 and again in the Final Cut of 2019, restores additional Kurtz material. Most critics consider the original 1979 cut the strongest.