Apocalypse Now

In 1969, during the Vietnam War, jaded MACV-SOG operative Captain Benjamin L. Willard is summoned to I Field Force headquarters in Nha Trang. The officers there tell him that U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz is waging a brutal war against North Vietnamese Army, Viet Cong, and Khmer Rouge forces without permission from his commanders. Kurtz is based at a remote jungle outpost in eastern Cambodia, where he commands American, Montagnard, and local Khmer militia troops who worship him. Willard is ordered to "terminate [Kurtz's] command... with extreme prejudice." He joins a U.S. Navy river patrol boat (PBR) commanded by the Chief Petty Officer Phillips, with crewmen Lance Johnson, "Chef" Hicks, and "Mr. Clean" Miller to quietly navigate up the Nùng River to Kurtz's outpost. Before reaching the coastal mouth of the Nùng, they rendezvous with the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment, a helicopter-borne air assault unit of the 1st Cavalry Division commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, to coordinate safe entry into the river. Kilgore hasn't been briefed on Willard's mission but becomes more engaged after discovering that Lance, a well-known fellow surfer, is with him. Kilgore agrees to escort the boat through the Nùng's Viet Cong-held coastal mouth and a full-scale air assault is executed on the village with "Ride of the Valkyries" playing on loudspeakers. Resisting Kilgore’s attempts to convince Lance to surf with him on the newly conquered beach, Willard gathers the sailors to board the PBR and continue their mission. Going ashore to find mangos, Willard and Chef are surprised by a tiger, leading Chef to have a brief mental breakdown. Willard starts seeing cracks form in the crew. Tensions rise when Willard insists on the priority of his mission over the Chief's usual patrol objectives. Willard partially reveals his orders to convince the Chief of the mission's importance. As Willard studies Kurtz's dossier, he is shocked by Kurtz's mid-career sacrifice by leaving a prestigious Pentagon assignment to join Special Forces, all but destroying his chances for career advancement. At a remote U.S. Army outpost, the boat receives a dispatch bag containing both official and personal mail. Willard learns that another MACV-SOG operative, Special Forces Captain Richard Colby, was sent on an earlier mission identical to Willard's and has since joined Kurtz. Lance activates a smoke grenade while under the influence of LSD, attracting enemy fire, causing Mr. Clean's death. Further upriver, the Chief is impaled by a spear thrown by Montagnards and attempts to kill Willard with the spear point protruding from his chest, but Willard overpowers him. Willard reveals his mission to Chef, now commanding the PBR. They arrive at Kurtz's outpost, a Khmer temple teeming with Montagnards and strewn with the remains of victims. Willard, Chef, and Lance are greeted by an American photojournalist, who praises Kurtz's genius. Willard encounters Colby and five other American soldiers among the Montagnards. He sets out with Lance to find Kurtz, leaving Chef with orders to call in an airstrike on the outpost if the two do not return. In the camp, Willard is questioned by Kurtz, then locked in a bamboo cage. One night Kurtz appears and drops Chef's severed head into Willard's lap. Willard is released, and warned not to attempt escape. Kurtz lectures him on his theories of war, praising the ruthlessness of the Viet Cong, and asks Willard to tell his son the truth about his mutiny. As the Montagnards ceremonially kill a water buffalo, Willard assassinates Kurtz with a machete. Kurtz's followers watch Willard depart with Kurtz's writings, and bow down to him. Willard leads Lance back to the PBR, and they depart. == Cast ==

• Marlon Brando as Colonel Walter Kurtz, a highly decorated United States Army Special Forces officer with the 5th Special Forces Group who goes rogue. He runs his own military unit based in Cambodia and is feared as much by the U.S. military as by the North Vietnamese Army, Viet Cong, and Khmer Rouge. • Robert Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel William "Bill" Kilgore, commander of 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment and surfing fanatic. His character is a composite of several real-life officers, including Colonels David Hackworth and John Stockton, Lieutenant General Hank "Gunfighter" Emerson, General James F. Hollingsworth and George Patton IV, also a West Point officer whom Robert Duvall knew. Duvall reports that he was upset that a scene where Kilgore saves the life of a Vietnamese baby during the beach assault was cut by Coppola, as he felt that it added to the complexity of his character. The scene is included in the Redux version. Duvall said that he found that the version of the character as originally written was too over-the-top, and asked Coppola for permission to change the character. Duvall also asked people in the military on how to portray the character as a tough unflinching officer. • Martin Sheen as U.S. Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a veteran assassin who is serving his third tour in Vietnam. The soldier who escorts him at the start of the film recites that Willard is from the 505th Battalion, of the elite 173rd Airborne Brigade, assigned to MACV-SOG. The opening scene—which features Willard staggering around his hotel room, culminating in him punching a mirror—was filmed on Sheen's 36th birthday when he was heavily intoxicated. The mirror that he broke was not a prop and caused his hand to bleed profusely, but he insisted on continuing the scene, despite Coppola's concerns. Sheen has said this performance where he writhes and smears himself in blood was spontaneous and was an exorcism of his longstanding alcoholism. Sheen's brother Joe Estevez stood in for Willard in some scenes and performed the character's voiceover narrations while his son Charlie appears in the film as an extra. Both went uncredited. • Albert Hall as Chief Petty Officer George Phillips. The Chief runs a tight ship and frequently clashes with Willard over authority. • Frederic Forrest as Engineman 3rd Class Jay "Chef" Hicks, a tightly wound aspiring chef and saucier from New Orleans. His vocational training was interrupted by his draft notice. Now, Hicks is horrified by his new surroundings. • Sam Bottoms as Gunner's Mate 3rd Class Lance B. Johnson, a former professional surfer from Orange County, California. In the bridge scene, he mentions having taken LSD. As the film progresses, Lance becomes increasingly strung out on drugs. He is completely silent in the last act of the film, entranced by the Montagnard tribe and participating in the sacrifice ritual. • Laurence Fishburne (credited as "Larry Fishburne") as Gunner's Mate 3rd Class Tyrone "Mr. Clean" Miller, the cocky 17-year-old South Bronx-born crewmember. Fishburne was only 14 when shooting began in March 1976, as he had lied about his age in order to be cast in the role. The production took so long, he was 18 by the time the film was released in August 1979. • Dennis Hopper as an American photojournalist, a manic disciple of Kurtz who greets Willard. According to the DVD commentary of Redux, the character is based on Sean Flynn, a famed news correspondent who disappeared in Cambodia in 1970. The character may also have been partially inspired by the British-Australian photojournalist Tim Page. • G. D. Spradlin as Lieutenant General R. Corman, military intelligence (G-2), an authoritarian officer who fears Kurtz and wants him removed. The character is named after filmmaker Roger Corman, who gave Coppola his first directorial work. • Harrison Ford as Colonel G. Lucas, aide to Corman and an Army intelligence specialist who gives Willard his orders. The character is named for George Lucas, who had directed Ford in American Graffiti and Star Wars, and with whom Coppola had founded American Zoetrope in 1969. Lucas was also intended to direct Apocalypse Now before getting busy making Star Wars. • Jerry Ziesmer as Jerry Moore, a CIA officer in civilian clothing who sits in on Willard's initial briefing. His only line in the film is "terminate with extreme prejudice." Ziesmer was also the film's assistant director. • Scott Glenn as Captain Richard M. Colby, previously assigned Willard's current mission before he defected to Kurtz's private army and sent a message to his wife, intercepted by the U.S. Army, telling her that he was never coming back and to sell everything they owned, including their children. • James Keane as Kilgore's Gunner, a man ready to battle to the tune of Ride of the Valkyries. • Kerry Rossall as Mike from San Diego, a soldier who surfs against incoming attacks. • Cynthia Wood as Playboy Playmate of the Year, Colleen Camp and Linda Beatty as Playmates of the Month. Wood was the 1974 Playmate of the Year, and Beatty was the August 1976 Playmate of the Month. • Bill Graham as Agent, the announcer in charge of the Playmates' show. • R. Lee Ermey (uncredited) as a helicopter pilot. Ermey was himself a former USMC drill instructor and Vietnam War veteran, and later achieved fame for his role as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket. • Tom Mason as Supply Sergeant • Jack Thibeau as Soldier in Trench Co-writer, producer, and director Francis Ford Coppola makes an uncredited cameo playing a TV news director filming beach combat; he shouts "Don't look at the camera, go by like you're fighting!". Additionally, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro plays the cameraman by Coppola's side. == Adaptation ==

Although inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it is not a direct adaptation. The novella, based on Conrad's experience as a steamboat captain in Africa, is set in the Congo Free State during the 19th century. Kurtz and Marlow (whose corresponding character in the movie is Capt. Willard) work for a Belgian trading company that brutally exploits its native African workers. After arriving at Kurtz's outpost, Marlow concludes that Kurtz has gone insane and is lording over a small tribe as a god. The novella ends with Kurtz dying on the trip back and the narrator musing about the darkness of the human psyche: "the heart of an immense darkness." In the novella, Marlow is the pilot of a river boat sent to collect ivory from Kurtz's outpost, only gradually becoming infatuated with Kurtz. In fact, when he discovers Kurtz in terrible health, Marlow makes an effort to bring him home safely (which Willard also does in Milius's draft screenplay). In the film, Willard is an assassin dispatched to kill Kurtz. Nevertheless, the depiction of Kurtz as a god-like leader of a tribe of natives, Kurtz's written exclamation "Exterminate all the brutes!" (which appears in the film as "Drop the bomb. Exterminate them all!") and his last words "The horror! The horror!" are taken from Conrad's novella. Coppola argues that many episodes in the film—the spear and arrow attack on the boat, for example—respect the spirit of the novella and in particular its critique of the concepts of civilization and progress. Other episodes adapted by Coppola—the Playboy Playmates' (Sirens) exit, the lost souls ("take me home") attempting to reach the boat, and Kurtz's tribe of (white-faced) natives parting the canoes (gates of Hell) for Willard (with Chef and Lance) to enter the camp—are likened to Virgil and "The Inferno" (Divine Comedy) by Dante. While Coppola replaced European colonialism with American interventionism, the message of Conrad's book is still clear. It is often speculated that Coppola's interpretation of the Kurtz character was modeled after Tony Poe, a highly decorated Vietnam-era paramilitary officer from the CIA's Special Activities Division. Poe's actions in Vietnam and in the "Secret War" in neighboring Laos, in particular his highly unorthodox and often savage methods of waging war, show many similarities to those of the fictional Kurtz; for example, Poe was known to drop severed heads from helicopters into enemy-controlled villages as a form of psychological warfare and use human ears to record the number of enemies his indigenous troops had killed. He would send these ears back to his superiors as proof of the efficacy of his operations deep inside Laos. Coppola denies that Poe was a primary influence and says the character was loosely based on Special Forces Colonel Robert Rheault, who was the actual head of 5th Special Forces Group (May to July 1969), and whose 1969 arrest over the murder of suspected double agent Thai Khac Chuyen in Nha Trang generated substantial contemporary news coverage, in the Green Beret Affair, including making public the phrase "terminate with extreme prejudice," which was used prominently in the movie. It is considered that the character of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore is based on several characters, including John B. Stockton, commander of the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam, and infantry general James F. Hollingsworth. Use of T. S. Eliot's poetry In the film, shortly before Colonel Kurtz dies, he recites part of T. S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men." The poem is preceded in printed editions by the epigraph "Mistah Kurtz – he dead," a quotation from Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Two books seen opened on Kurtz's desk in the film are From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston and The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer, the two books that Eliot cited as the chief sources and inspiration for his poem "The Waste Land." Eliot's original epigraph for "The Waste Land" was this passage from Heart of Darkness, which ends with Kurtz's final words: When Willard is first introduced to Dennis Hopper's character, the photojournalist describes his own worth in relation to that of Kurtz with: "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas," from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Additionally, Dennis Hopper's character paraphrases the end of "The Hollow Men" to Martin Sheen's character: "This is the way the fucking world ends! [...] Not with a bang, but with a whimper." == Production ==

Development While working as an assistant for Francis Ford Coppola on The Rain People in 1967, filmmaker John Milius was encouraged by his friends George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to write a Vietnam War film. He came up with the idea for adapting the plot of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War setting. He had read the novel as a teenager and was reminded about it when his college screenwriting professor, Irwin Blacker of USC, mentioned the several unsuccessful attempts to adapt it into a movie. Blacker challenged his class by saying, "No screenwriter has ever perfected a film adaption of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Coppola gave Milius $15,000 to write the screenplay with the promise of an additional $10,000 if it were green-lit. Milius says that he wrote the screenplay in 1969, Milius wanted to use Conrad's novel as "a sort of allegory. It would have been too simple to have followed the book completely." Milius based the character of Willard and some of Kurtz's on a friend of his, Fred Rexer. Rexer claimed to have experienced, first-hand, the scene relayed by Brando's character wherein the arms of villagers are hacked off by the Viet Cong; and that Kurtz was based on Robert B. Rheault, head of Special Forces in Vietnam. Scholars have never found any evidence to corroborate Rexer's claim, nor any similar Viet Cong behavior, and consider it an urban legend. At one point, Coppola told Milius, "Write every scene you ever wanted to go into that movie", Warner Bros.-Seven Arts acquired the screenplay in 1969 but put it into turnaround. He approached Apocalypse Now as a black comedy, and intended to shoot it after making THX 1138, with principal photography to start in 1971. In the spring of 1974, he discussed with friends and co-producers Fred Roos and Gray Frederickson the idea of producing the film. He asked Lucas, then Milius, to direct it, but both were involved with other projects (Lucas in particular had gotten the go-ahead to make Star Wars). Keith Carradine, Tommy Lee Jones, Nick Nolte, and Frederic Forrest were also considered for Willard. In a 2015 The Hollywood Reporter interview, Clint Eastwood revealed that Coppola offered him the role of Willard, but much like McQueen and Pacino, he did not want to be away from America for a long time. He also revealed that McQueen tried to convince him to play Willard; McQueen wanted to play Kurtz because he would have to work for only two weeks. Coppola offered the lead role of Willard to Robert De Niro, but he declined due to other commitments. Coppola also offered the role of Colonel Kurtz to Orson Welles and Lee Marvin, both of whom turned it down. Coppola and Roos had been impressed by Martin Sheen's screen test for Michael in The Godfather and he became the second choice to play Willard, but he had already accepted another project. Harvey Keitel was cast in the role based on his work in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. By early 1976, Coppola had persuaded Marlon Brando to play Kurtz, for a fee of $2 million for a month's work on location in September 1976. Brando also received 10% of the gross theatrical rental and 10% of the television sale rights, earning him around $9 million. Hackman was set to play Wyatt Khanage, who later became Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall. Principal photography On March 1, 1976, Coppola and his family flew to Manila and rented a large house there for the planned four-month shoot. The film was due to be released on Coppola's 38th birthday, April 7, 1977. Only four days of reshoots were reportedly required after the change. Despite the increasing costs, Coppola promised the University of the Philippines Film Center 1% of the profits, up to $1 million, for a film study trust fund. After Christmas 1976, Coppola viewed a rough assembly of the footage but still needed to improvise an ending. He returned to the Philippines in early 1977 and resumed filming. On March 5 of that year, Sheen, then only 36, had a near-fatal heart attack and struggled for a quarter of a mile to reach help. By then the film was so over-budget, Sheen worried that funding would be halted if word about his condition reached investors, and he claimed that he had suffered heat stroke instead. Until he returned to the set on April 19, his brother Joe Estevez filled in for him, being shot from behind so close-ups of Sheen could be shot after he got better. Coppola later admitted that he could no longer tell which scenes were of Joe or Martin. A major sequence in a French plantation cost hundreds of thousands of dollars but was cut from the final film. Rumors began to circulate that Apocalypse Now had several endings, but Richard Beggs, who worked on the sound elements, said, "There were never five endings, but just the one, even if there were differently edited versions." These rumors came from Coppola departing frequently from the original screenplay. Coppola admitted that he had no ending because Brando was too fat to play the scenes as written in the original script. With the help of Dennis Jakob, Coppola decided the ending could be "the classic myth of the murderer who gets up the river, kills the king, and then himself becomes the king—it's the Fisher King, from The Golden Bough." Principal photography ended on May 21, 1977, after 238 days. In the summer of 1977, Coppola told Walter Murch that he had four months to assemble the sound. Murch realized that the script had originally been narrated but Coppola abandoned the idea during filming. Murch thought that there was a way to assemble the film without narration but that it would take ten months, and decided to give it another try. He put it back in, recording it all himself. By September, Coppola told his wife that he felt "there is only about a 20% chance [I] can pull the film off". He convinced United Artists executives to delay the premiere from May to October 1978. In January 1978, Herr received a call from Zoetrope, asking him if he could write the film's narration based on his well-received book about Vietnam, Dispatches. He said that the narration already written was "totally useless" and spent a year creating a new set of narration, with Coppola giving him very definite guidelines. Sheen was too busy to record the voice-over narration so Estevez, whose voice was almost identical to his brother's, was called back in to record the narration instead. Murch had problems trying to make a stereo soundtrack for Apocalypse Now because sound libraries had no stereo recordings of weapons. The sound material brought back from the Philippines was inadequate because the small location crew lacked the time and resources to record jungle sounds and ambient noises. Murch and his crew fabricated the mood of the jungle on the soundtrack. Apocalypse Now used novel sound techniques for a movie, as Murch insisted on recording the most up-to-date gunfire. Murch employed the Dolby Stereo 70 mm Six Track system for the 70 mm release and used a similar layout to Star Wars' "baby boom" mix which consolidated vocals to the center channel, while the left-center and right-center channels were used to enhance deep bass effects, but used two channels of sound behind the audience to create a more immersive soundscape for the film’s helicopter sequences, creating what was later known as a 5.1 mix. The 35 mm release used the new Dolby Stereo optical stereo system, but due to limitations of the technology at the time, the 35 mm release that played in most theaters did not include surround sound. In May 1978, Coppola postponed the opening until spring of 1979. The cost overruns had reached $18 million, for which Coppola was personally liable, but he had retained rights to the picture in perpetuity. Coppola would later say that the animals were part of the production deal. Real human corpses were bought from a man who turned out to be a grave-robber. The police questioned the film crew, holding their passports, and soldiers took the bodies away. Instead, extras were used to pose as corpses in the film. During filming, Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando did not get along, leading Brando to refuse to be on the set at the same time as Hopper. ==Release==

In April 1979, Coppola screened a "work in progress" for 900 people; it was not well received. That year, he was invited to screen Apocalypse Now at the Cannes Film Festival. United Artists was not keen on showing an unfinished version to so many members of the press. However, since his 1974 film The Conversation had won the Palme d'Or, Coppola agreed to screen Apocalypse Now with the festival only a month away. The week before Cannes, Coppola arranged three sneak previews of a 139-minute cut in Westwood, Los Angeles on May 11 attended by 2,000 paying customers, some of whom lined up for over 6 hours. Other cuts shown in 1979 ran 150 and 165 minutes. for which Coppola had obtained permission from the various guilds (Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild, and Writers Guild of America) and instead provided a printed program with credits. and met with prolonged applause. It was the first work in progress ever shown in competition at the festival. His comments upset newspaper critic Rex Reed, who reportedly stormed out of the conference. Apocalypse Now won the Palme d'Or for best film, along with Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum – a decision reportedly greeted with "some boos and jeers from the audience." Theatrical release On August 15, 1979, Apocalypse Now was released in North America in only three theaters equipped to play the Dolby Stereo 70 mm film prints with stereo surround sound: the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City, the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles and the University Theatre in Toronto. Coppola explained he had shot the explosion footage during demolition of the sets, whose destruction and removal were required by the Philippine government. He filmed the demolition with cameras fitted with different film stocks and lenses to capture the explosions at different speeds. He wanted to do something with the dramatic footage and decided to add them to the credits. Re-release The film was re-released on August 28, 1987, in six cities, to capitalize on the success of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and other Vietnam War movies. New 70 mm prints were shown in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, St. Louis and Cincinnati—cities where the film had done well in 1979. It was given the same kind of release as the exclusive 1979 engagement, with no logo or credits, and audiences were given a printed program. Versions Apocalypse Now Redux In 2001, Coppola released Apocalypse Now Redux in cinemas and subsequently on DVD. This is an extended version that restores 49 minutes of scenes cut from the original film. Coppola has continued to circulate the original version as well: the two versions are packaged together in the Complete Dossier DVD, released on August 15, 2006, and in the Blu-ray edition released on October 19, 2010. The longest section of added footage in the Redux version is the "French Plantation" sequence, a chapter involving the de Marais family's rubber plantation, a holdover from the colonization of French Indochina, featuring Coppola's two sons Gian-Carlo and Roman as children of the family. Around the dinner table, a young French child recites a poem by Charles Baudelaire entitled ''L'albatros''. The French family patriarch is not satisfied with the child's recitation. The child is sent away. These scenes were removed from the 1979 cut, which premiered at Cannes. In behind-the-scenes footage in Hearts of Darkness, Coppola expresses his anger, on the set, at the technical limitations of the scenes, the result of shortage of money. At the time of the Redux version, it was possible to digitally enhance the footage to accomplish Coppola's vision. In the scenes, the French family patriarchs argue about the positive side of colonialism in Indochina and denounce the betrayal of the military men in the First Indochina War. Hubert de Marais argues that French politicians sacrificed entire battalions at Điện Biên Phủ, and tells Willard that the US created the Viet Cong (as the Viet Minh) to fend off Japanese invaders. Other added material includes extra combat footage before Willard meets Kilgore, a scene in which Willard's team steals Kilgore's surfboard (which sheds some light on the hunt for the mangoes), a follow-up scene to the dance of the Playboy Playmates, in which Willard's team finds the Playmates stranded after their helicopter has run out of fuel (trading two barrels of fuel for two hours with the Bunnies), and a scene of Kurtz reading from a Time magazine article about the war, surrounded by Cambodian children. A deleted scene titled "Monkey Sampan" shows Willard and the PBR crew suspiciously eyeing an approaching sampan juxtaposed to Montagnard villagers joyfully singing "Light My Fire" by The Doors. As the sampan gets closer, Willard realizes there are monkeys on it and no helmsman. Finally, just as the two boats pass, the wind turns the sail and exposes a naked dead Viet Cong (VC) nailed to the sail boom. His body is mutilated and looks as though the man had been flogged and castrated. The singing stops. As they pass on by, Chief notes out loud, "That's comin' from where we goin', Captain." The boat then slowly passes the giant tail of a shot down B-52 bomber as the noise of engines high in the sky is heard. Coppola said that he made up for cutting this scene by having the PBR pass under an aircraft tail in the final release. First Assembly A 289-minute First Assembly circulates as a video bootleg, containing extra material not included in either the original theatrical release or the "redux" version. This cut of the film does not feature Carmine Coppola's score, instead using several Doors tracks. Apocalypse Now Final Cut In April 2019, Coppola showed Apocalypse Now Final Cut for the 40th anniversary screening at the Tribeca Film Festival. This new version is Coppola's preferred version of the film and has a runtime of three hours and three minutes, with Coppola having cut 20 minutes of the added material from Redux; the scenes deleted include the second encounter with the Playmates, parts of the plantation sequence, and Kurtz's reading of Time magazine. It is also the first time the film has been restored from the original camera negative at 4K; previous transfers were made from an interpositive. It was released in autumn 2019, along with an extended cut of The Cotton Club. It also had a release in select IMAX theaters on August 15 and 18, 2019, in a collaboration between IMAX and Lionsgate. Home media The home media release history of Apocalypse Now is summarized in the following table. Although the dates are for the American publication of the home media editions, releases by publishers in other territories are identical in content and format. Despite filming Apocalypse Now in 2.35:1, the film's cinematographer Vittorio Storaro periodically approved home media releases in his preferred aspect ratio, the 2.00:1 Univisium. This aggressive crop of the original 2.35:1 film negative has been done away with in all releases since Coppola's American Zoetrope reassigned home media rights to Lionsgate Home Entertainment in 2010. Cuts featuring Coppola's 2001 audio commentary are marked with a double dagger (); the 2006 theatrical commentary is an edited version. == Reception ==

Critical response On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Apocalypse Now holds an approval rating of 91% based on 148 reviews, with an average rating of 9.0/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "A voyage to hell where the journey is more satisfying than the destination, Francis Ford Coppola's haunting, hallucinatory Vietnam War epic is cinema at its most audacious and visionary." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 94 out of 100 based on 15 critics, indicating "universal acclaim." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A–" on a scale of A+ to F. Upon its release, Apocalypse Now received mixed reviews. In his original review, Roger Ebert gave the film four stars out of a possible four and wrote: "Apocalypse Now achieves greatness not by analyzing our 'experience in Vietnam', but by re-creating, in characters and images, something of that experience." and named it "The best film of 1979." Ebert concluded by writing: "What's great in the film, and what will make it live for many years and speak to many audiences, is what Coppola achieves on the levels Truffaut was discussing: the moments of agony and joy in making cinema. Some of those moments occur at the same time; remember again the helicopter assault and its unsettling juxtaposition of horror and exhilaration. Remember the weird beauty of the massed helicopters lifting above the trees in the long shot, and the insane power of Wagner's music, played loudly during the attack, and you feel what Coppola was getting at: Those moments as common in life as art, when the whole huge grand mystery of the world, so terrible, so beautiful, seems to hang in the balance." Ebert added Coppola's film to his list of The Great Movies in 1999, stating how two decades of hindsight proved: "Apocalypse Now is the best Vietnam film [and] one of the greatest of all films, because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul. It is not about war so much as about how war reveals truths we would be happy never to discover." In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin wrote: 'as a noble use of the medium and as a tireless expression of national anguish, it towers over everything that has been attempted by an American filmmaker in a very long time.' Other reviews were less positive; Frank Rich, writing for Time, said: 'While much of the footage is breathtaking, Apocalypse Now is emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty.' Vincent Canby argued: 'Mr. Coppola himself describes it as 'operatic', but... Apocalypse Now is neither a tone poem nor an opera. It's an adventure yarn with delusions of grandeur, a movie that ends — in the all-too-familiar words of the poet Mr. Coppola drags in by the bootstraps — not with a bang, but a whimper.' Commentators have debated whether Apocalypse Now is an anti-war or pro-war film. Some evidence of the film's anti-war message includes the purposeless brutality of the war, the absence of military leadership, and the imagery of machinery destroying nature. Advocates of a pro-war stance view these same elements as a glorification of war and the assertion of American supremacy. According to Frank Tomasulo, 'the US foisting its culture on Vietnam', including the destruction of a village so that soldiers could surf, affirms the film's pro-war message. Nidesh Lawtoo illustrates the ambiguity of the film by focusing on the contradictory responses the movie in general – and the "Ride of the Valkyries" scene in particular – triggered in a university classroom. Writing for The Nation, critic Robert Hatch felt the "moral indignation" behind Apocalypse Now was "lost in giantism," saying that the film presented the war as "one bloody huge circus" and that Coppola had "done no more than demonstrate the obvious — that in Vietnam we fought a bad war." According to Coppola, the film may be considered anti-war, but is even more anti-lie: '...the fact that a culture can lie about what's really going on in warfare, that people are being brutalized, tortured, maimed, and killed, and somehow present this as moral is what horrifies me, and perpetuates the possibility of war'. In 2019, however, Coppola told Kevin Perry of The Guardian that he hesitated to call the film anti-war, stating .".. an anti-war film, I always thought, should be like [Kon Ichikawa's 1956 post-second world war drama] The Burmese Harp – something filled with love and peace and tranquillity and happiness. It shouldn't have sequences of violence that inspire a lust for violence. Apocalypse Now has stirring scenes of helicopters attacking innocent people. That's not anti-war." In May 2011, a new restored digital print of Apocalypse Now was released in UK cinemas, distributed by Optimum Releasing. Total Film magazine gave the film a five-star review, stating: 'This is the original cut rather than the 2001 'Redux' (be gone, jarring French plantation interlude!), digitally restored to such heights you can, indeed, get a nose full of the napalm.' Box office Apocalypse Now performed well at the box office when it opened on August 15, 1979. It initially opened in three theaters in New York City, Toronto, and Hollywood, grossing $322,489 in its first five days. It has grossed over $80 million in the United States and Canada with a worldwide total of $150 million. Accolades ;American Film Institute lists • AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies – No. 28 • AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes: • "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." – No. 12 • "The horror, the horror." – Nominated • AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains: • Colonel Walter E. Kurtz – Nominated Villain • AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – No. 30 == Legacy ==

'' newspaper, illustrating the euro area crisis with imagery from the movie, attests to the film's pervasive cultural impact. In contrast to its mixed reviews upon release, today the movie is regarded by many as a masterpiece of the New Hollywood era. Roger Ebert considered it the finest film on the Vietnam War and included it on his list for the 2002 Sight & Sound poll for the greatest movie of all time. In the 2002 Sight & Sound director's poll of the "greatest films of all time," it was ranked No. 19. It is on the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Movies list at number 28, but dropped to number 30 on their 10th anniversary list. Kilgore's quotation, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," written by Milius, was number 12 on the AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Movie Quotes list and was also voted the greatest movie speech of all time in a 2004 poll. In 2006, Writers Guild of America ranked the screenplay, by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola, the 55th greatest ever. It is number 7 on Empires 2008 list of the 500 greatest movies of all time. Empire re-ranked it at #20 in their 2014 list of The 301 Greatest Movies of All Time, and again at #22 on their 2018 list of The 100 Greatest Movies. It was voted No. 66 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the prominent French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 2008. In 2010, The Guardian named Apocalypse Now "the best action and war film of all time." In 2016, The Hollywood Reporter ranked it 11th among 69 winners of the ''Palme d'Or. The New York Times included it on its Best 1000 Movies Ever list. Entertainment Weekly'' ranked it as having one of the "10 Best Surfing Scenes" in cinema. Slant Magazine named Marlon Brando's role one the "15 Famous Movie Psychopaths". On December 14, 1981, a day after martial law was enacted in the Soviet-controlled Polish People's Republic, photographer Chris Niedenthal photographed an OT-64 SKOT armored personnel carrier with soldiers of the Polish People's Army standing around it, in front of the with a banner containing the Polish-language title of the movie, which was (literally: Time of the Apocalypse). The photo became one of the most recognizable symbols of the events during the martial law in Poland between 1981 and 1983. In 2002, Sight and Sound magazine invited several critics to name the best film of the last 25 years, and Apocalypse Now was named number one. It was also listed as the second-best war film by viewers on Channel 4's 100 Greatest War Films, and was the second-best war movie of all time based on the Movifone list (after ''Schindler's List) and the IMDb War movie list (after The Longest Day''). It is ranked number 1 on Channel 4's 50 Films to See Before You Die. In a 2004 poll of UK film fans, Blockbuster listed Kilgore's eulogy to napalm as the best movie speech. The helicopter attack scene with the Ride of the Valkyries soundtrack was chosen as the most memorable film scene ever by Empire magazine. (The scene is recalled in one of the last acts of the 2012 video game Far Cry 3, when the music is played while the character shoots from a helicopter. It was likewise adapted for the ''Cat's Eye anime episode "From Runan Island with Love" and the Battle of Italica scene in Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri''.) In 2009, the London Film Critics' Circle voted Apocalypse Now the best film of the last 30 years. It was also included in BBC's 2015 list of the 100 greatest American films. In 2011, actor Charlie Sheen, son of the film's leading actor Martin, started playing clips from the film on his live tour and played the film in its entirety during post-show parties. One of Sheen's films, the 1993 comedy Hot Shots! Part Deux, includes a brief scene where Charlie is riding a boat up a river in Iraq while on a rescue mission and passes Martin, as Captain Willard, going the other way. As they pass, each man shouts to the other "I loved you in Wall Street!," referring to the 1987 film that featured both of them. Additionally, the promotional material for Hot Shots! Part Deux included a mockumentary that aired on HBO titled ''Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux—A Filmmaker's Apology, a parody of the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse about the making of Apocalypse Now''. The film is credited with creating the Philippines surfing culture around the town of Baler, where the helicopter attack and surfing sequences were filmed. On January 25, 2017, Coppola announced that he was seeking funding through Kickstarter for a horror role-playing video game based on Apocalypse Now. It was later canceled by Montgomery Markland, the game's director, as revealed on its official Tumblr page. The Sympathizer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Vietnamese-American author Viet Thanh Nguyen, features a subplot that Nguyen describes as a critique of Apocalypse Now. He told the New York Times that "Apocalypse Now is an important work of art, but that doesn't mean I'm going to bow down before it. I'm going to fight with it because it fought with me." He said that the film centered on American perspectives of the war rather than Vietnamese experiences. He was especially critical of the scene where all the passengers of a boat were unjustly killed by the traveling party: "People just like me were being slaughtered. I felt violated." The Seiko 6105 and its subsequent reissues have been nicknamed the "Captain Willard," in reference to its use by the eponymous character. In 2025, The Hollywood Reporter listed Apocalypse Now as having the best stunts of 1979. In 2025, President Donald Trump made a reference to Apocalypse Now in a Truth Social post where he voiced support for a military occupation of Chicago. == Documentaries ==

''Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse'' (1991) (American Zoetrope/Zaloom Mayfield Productions); Directed by Eleanor Coppola, George Hickenlooper, and Fax Bahr Apocalypse Now – The Complete Dossier DVD (Paramount Home Entertainment) (2006). Disc 2 extras include: • The Post Production of Apocalypse Now: Documentary (four featurettes covering the editing, music, and sound of the film through Coppola and his team) • "A Million Feet of Film: The Editing of Apocalypse Now" (18 minutes). Written and directed by Kim Aubry. • "The Music of Apocalypse Now" (15 minutes) • "Heard Any Good Movies Lately? The Sound Design of Apocalypse Now" (15 minutes) • "The Final Mix" (3 minutes) == Soundtrack ==

• "The End" – performed by The Doors • "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" – performed by The Rolling Stones • "Love Me, and Let Me Love You" – performed by Robert Duvall • "The Ride of the Valkyries" – performed by The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra • "Let the Good Times Roll" – performed by Shirley and Lee • "Suzie Q" – performed by Flash Cadillac • Excerpts from Mnong Gar Music from Vietnam • Collection Musee de l'homme • "Surfin' Safari" – performed by the Beach Boys == See also ==