Second coming of the Apocalypse.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher
• Position: Reel World - Review

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA'S "Apocalypse Now" was rereleased in an extended version last summer under the title of "Apocalypse Now Redux," enjoying critical fanfare that surprised many people knowledgeable of its history and reception. At its initial release in 1979, the picture received mixed reviews at best. Pauline Kael, the renowned critic for The New Yorker and a Coppola supporter, termed "Apocalypse Now" a "nearly complete failure." Meanwhile, critics proclaimed "Apocalypse Now Redux" a "masterpiece." The changing perception says as much about the current state of Hollywood as it does about the fickleness of journalistic critics.

Coppola's epic of the Vietnam War began production in 1976, only to be plagued by a series of hardships that fast became part of the movie's legend. Production was shut down several times because of typhoons that destroyed its Philippine-based set and a heart attack that nearly killed its star, Martin Sheen. Using Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness for its plot structure and crammed with allusions to TS. Eliot and other mainstays of modernism, "Apocalypse Now" was seen by many as pretentious and indulgent, with little or no attention to the particulars of the Cold War foreign policy that took the U.S. into Southeast Asia. The hardships seemed to add to the movie's mystique, and neither the production disasters nor Coppola's freewheeling budget totally jinxed it in industry eyes. Nevertheless, "Apocalypse Now," complete with on- and offscreen disasters and Cannes Film Festival awards, made its way into cinematic history.

The film tells the story of Capt. Willard, a Special Forces operative dispatched by the CIA to assassinate a "renegade" Green Beret colonel named Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Willard and a crew of misfits travel in a patrol boat upriver from South Vietnam into Cambodia, encountering a series of horrendous and bizarre adventures meant to suggest the insanity of the Vietnam debacle. Col. Kilgore (Robert Duval), an Air Cavalry officer who thinks he's Custer, invites Willard and company to go surfing just before he napalms a village. Legendary rock impresario Bill Graham hosts a Playboy show, complete with scantily clad bunnies, in the middle of a war zone.

In the new expanded edition, Coppola restores a lengthy scene at a French plantation, a ghostly holdover from the era of that nation's colonial occupation in Indochina. One of the movie's most poetic moments (although it slows down the picture to...