Apocalypse Now Review

Vittorio Storaro shoots the war in saturated color as a series of theatrical light sources, napalm orange, flare green, purple smoke, so that the further upriver the boat travels the more the images abandon documentary logic. Everything on that journey is superb. The helicopter assault, cut to Wagner and staged with real aircraft in long unbroken passes, remains the most technically overwhelming action sequence of its era, and Robert Duvall's Kilgore is monstrous precisely because he is having a wonderful morning.

Walter Murch's sound work, mixed for a then-unheard-of multichannel release, makes the jungle itself an antagonist. Martin Sheen's hotel-room breakdown, genuinely drunk and bleeding, sets a level of exposure the film keeps demanding. What it cannot do is land. Brando arrives improvising in the dark, the material turns to muttered abstraction, and a picture built on forward motion stalls into fog and philosophy. The journey is a masterpiece; the arrival is a shrug.