Apocalypse Now

REVIEW
A masterpiece of modern cinema, Coppola's epic reworking of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" is a mind-blowing, semi-hallucinatory examination of not only the insanity of the Vietnam War, but of war itself. Sheen gives a career performance as a military assassin sent on a mission deep into enemy territory to hunt down a renegade colonel (Brando). Duvall, as an air cavalry commander, gets to utter the classic line, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." Coppola, cast and crew made a real-life, two-year sojourn into the Philippine jungle to make the film. Along the way Sheen suffered a heart attack, sets were destroyed by typhoons, and the script was rewritten daily. (The making of Apocalypse is expertly chronicled in the documentary Hearts of Darkness.)

If ever there was a foray into experimental improvisation on a big-budget film, this is it. The result, which could have easily been disastrous, is instead a remarkably coherent, superbly acted peek into human cruelty and frailty.