Apocalypse Now Redux (Francis Ford Coppola) 2001
I watched the new cut of Coppola's film today (after re-watching the original
release a few weeks ago), and I think the new edit is slightly misguided. In the
original cut of Apocalypse Now, we're placed in the shoes of the Willard
character (who functions as an everyman) as he makes his journey up the river.
The scenes that are added seem to have been intended to flesh out his & his
boat mates characters, but I don't think that's the direction that the film
should be taken in.
In order for Willard to function as our stand-in, his character cannot be too
defined. By showing him fraternizing with the crew members or scoring with a
chick, they're changing his role. In the original cut, he really only acts a few
times in the film before killing Kurtz (most notably when he shoots the woman
with the puppy). Here we see him as a much more active character. He's not
simply an observer of the war's insanity... He seems an active participant. To
me, this takes away from my ability to feel that *I* have gone on the film's
journey, and that *I* have seen the horror that man is capable of.
His crew members seemed almost iconic in their vagueness, but here they are
mildly developed, so they become less iconic, but are not so developed that they
lose that generic feeling. What Kurtz actually says remains as irrelevant to the
film's message as ever, since he's still obviously insane. While they're still
well-acted parts , it's somewhat disappointing.
Basically, what I'm saying is that the additional scenes do more to hurt the
overall film (the French plantation sequence seems to really hurt the pacing the
most) than to help it. They aren't bad scenes at all, but they simply don't have
a place in the film. Apocalypse Now Redux, like most "Special
Editions" these days, is a reduction of the original.
***1/2