This is a road film (river variation), and like many road films it proceeds as a sequence of set pieces, some more successful than others. It excels in spectacle and there are amazing scenes. In one I counted eleven helicopters, followed immediately by a scene with three jet fighters. Whole swathes of jungle are set on fire, and simulation Vietnamese villages were constructed to be destroyed in seconds. The purpose of the film is to embody and express the madness of America at the time of the Vietnamese war and as it was emerging from the revolutionary sixties. In this it is very successful. It is imaginative, hallucinatory and mad, and stands as a document of those times.
It nevertheless has deficiencies. It is famously based on Joseph Conrad's novel Heart Of Darkness, in that a man goes up a river, and has a screenplay written by John Milius and Coppola, the director. Milius has writing credits in 28 films, and these contain some solid films but no pinnacles of cinema. This being an American film it is the action that counts, and the few scenes with dialogue, acting and exchanges (one with Harrison Ford!) are somewhat wooden and cliched, but do transport the narrative to the next action-filled scene. Robert Duvall, soon after his legal duties in The Godfather, is amazing in his cowboy hat.
Martin Sheen plays Willard, whose job it is to chase down and confront Curtz. Sheen looks fresh from school via a bad period of drugs and alcohol, all bad attitude, disconnection, and bemusement at what is going on around him. As he travels up the river towards Curtz he studies Curtz's file and a voice-over drills into us the exemplary nature of Curtz's career until he went astray.
When Willard finally confronts Curtz, played by Marlon Brando, there are a few exchanges between them, although I'm not sure they were ever both in the same room, and Willard kills Curtz at the same time as an ox is being ritually slaughtered in Curtz' community. I looked away.
Brando already at this time had a reputation of poor behaviour and I had the impression that Coppola was grateful for anything Brando would do in front of the camera, and his appearance in this film is as helpful as a sighting of the Loch Ness monster. All we can do is stare and wonder.
I would have liked Willard to be older and more near to being Curtz's peer in experience and status, so that the confrontation between them may have been more interesting (screenwriting skills permitting) but, as I said, this being an American film, it is the action that counts.
I didn't understand why the voice-over, which became tedious and repetitive, told us so often and in so many ways what a good career Curtz had had because he was just the bogey man up the river and the exemplariness of his career didn't bring much to the story.
Not too many films have tackled America's trauma at the time of the Vietnam war, and I'm not sure this has the best crack at it. I'm thinking particularly of Karel Reisz' Dog Soldiers (aka Who'll Stop The Rain) in Which ex-Vet Nick Nolte freaks out and goes up a mountain and wires it for sound; a better-written drama, but with less madness and spectacle.
After Willard has killed Curtz the community that had followed Curtz turned to Willard as a leader and stared at him silently, but he was having none of it, and they parted for him as he walked back to the river (I'm not sure if he'd booked a boat), and I think they forgot to ask him his name.
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