The Movie: Again, another movie I rented from Netflix because I should have seen it a long time ago, and never did. This movie was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and was released in 1979. It's based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness but rather than being set on some African river (i think), it was set in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. I read Conrad's story many years ago, back when I was in junior high school, so I don't remember too many details about it except that there was a river, a jungle, and a guy named Mr. Kurtz at the end of that jungle.

In this movie, that Mr. Kurtz is a Colonel Kurtz and he's played by Marlon Brando. Somewhere along the line you run into Robert Duvall who utters the famous line "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." Hey didn't these two guys work together with director Francis Coppola on a little movie called The Godfather? Speaking of which, the guy who played Senator Geary in The Godfather Part 2 had a bit part in this movie. And speaking of bit parts, one Harrison Ford played a small role. And oh yeah, another actor in this movie was one very young "Larry" Fishburne.

Although this movie may have been billed as starring Marlon Brando and Robert Duvall, the real star was Martin Sheen, who plays the guy who is assigned to seek out and kill Col. Kurtz (Brando). This movie was well, wacky, weird, but very cool. In fact, it's one of the very few movies that have ever made me want to watch the "director's commentary" on the DVD, the only other movies being the Godfather DVD collection, also directed by Coppola.

It's rather odd, but really cool in some weird way that I can't really describe right now, but it's definitely worth a watch if for no other reason than to see the increasingly insane madness as you travel along down the river. But yeah, I recommend this movie, you should see it if you haven't already.

The DVD: Some time during the year 2001, Apocalypse Now: Redux was released on DVD with almost an hour's worth of extra footage. I could have rented that version, but I chose not to, as I wanted to see the version that everyone has already seen and thinks is so great. But before I go on, the Redux version is also a new film transfer of supposedly high quality. I haven't seen it though, so I can't make any judgments.

The version I did see was presented in a weird 2.0:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio... weird not only because it's an odd number, but the original (or so I've read) was a 2.35:1 version, and this one has been cut down a bit. It also had a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack that I suppose was remastered since the original (as far as I can tell from the credits) was in Dolby Stereo.

The film transfer is clean, but 1970's grainy. A blurb I read about the Redux version claims that it has better color, but again, I cannot make any such judgments since that's not the version I saw. Special features include a theatrical trailer (which was surprisingly encoded anamorphically as well), director's commentary, as well as some text about the production of the movie... and unlike most movies, this movie was actually interesting enough for me to want to actually read that stuff on my TV... this is probably the first movie ever that I've done that on.

So yeah. This is an interesting movie that I think you should see if you already haven't. And the DVD for the most part, just presents the movie without too many extra frills. And of course, if you're a real fan of this movie, there's the Redux version with the extra footage that you might wanna check out. The end.