APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) | FIRST TIME WATCHING | MOVIE REACTION

The fact that you were able to edit that down to under 40 minutes and still maintain much of the context, was a massive achievement on its own. Well done and thanks for this.

the only movie I have seen in a theatre that, when it was over, the entire audience walked out in compete silence. Not a word uttered. Not even a whisper.

Robert Englund tells a story about auditioning for this movie (he wanted to play Lance, the surfer). Coppola's casting director told him they were no longer looking for someone for that role, but he might fit for the space fantasy George Lucas was casting across the hall. And that was how Freddy Krueger auditioned to play Luke Skywalker. He didn't get the part, but he did go home to his roommate, Mark Hamill, and suggest that he have his agent set up an audition.

Your ability to empathize is your biggest asset. Never feel like you have to justify your sensitivity. It's a beautiful thing.

The making of Apocalypse Now was famously a nightmare for Francis Ford Coppola. Long delays from the rainy season, Harvey Keitel getting fired, Martin Sheen having a heart attack, Marlon Brando playing a super fit special forces officer and turning up on set massively overweight. The documentary Heart of Darkness shows the insanity really bled into the real life production of the movie

My brother was a movie theater manager and his theater showed this when it came out (back when many theaters had only one screen). He told me some Vietnam vets would come to see it but as soon it started, with the helicopters flying by is slow motions with the altered propeller sounds, a few would go back to the box office and ask for their money back because those images instantly brought back terrible memories. He always gave them a refund.

this is the greatest horror film ever made. the constant sense of dread just wares you down and then it actually shows you real horror

When Willard, talking about home says "...I'd been there and it doesn't exist." This is some brilliant writing, he is describing the effect war has on the men sent to fight and how the horrors they experience changes them, that they can't relate to normal life despite it being all they desperately want. Home is now in the past, they are a very different person now - damaged by what they have seen, the innocence they once had has been stolen so going home can never feel the same. This is also a theme in Tolkiens work and the Lord of The Rings, he fought in WW1. Everything you fight for and even if you win, the cost of winning is so hard and takes so much - so finally when you get home, the thing you were fighting for no longer exists.

the young black 17years old kid on the boat, was (the 14 years old in reality) Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus from the Matrix)

To quote Francis Ford Coppola at Cannes in 1979: "My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane."

There is a documentary about the making of this movie. Coppola's wife says in an interview that it was like the story. "We went into the jungle and slowly went mad."

Cassie's empathy is the #1 reason why her videos are always at the top of my watch cue. I love that she is willing to watch something she doesn't think she will enjoy, for the experience and with the motivation of keeping an open mind.

There's a documentary about the making of this film called "Hearts of Darkness". It was one of the most grueling and crazy shoots ever (IIRC, Sheen had a heart attack close to filming and Brando was massively overweight). It's amazing they made the film they did.

Robert Duvall is the G.O.A.T.

I think you sort of missed 1) the importance of, and 2) the meaning of Robert Duvall's character, Colonel Kilgore (Kill Gore). His key line begins with one of the most famous lines in any movie ever. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning..." And ends with the best half second of acting in the movie. When he says "One day this war is going to end" you can see the regret in his face and his shirtless body. The idea of peace deflates his chest... it literally makes him smaller. Kilgore stands in for every war monger in our society. The ones who thrive on war. The ones who love it. His role in this movie is to sum up perfectly the insanity of war and thinking that it is a means to an end. Rather, for Kilgore and those he represents, it is the end they seek. Watch that scene over again.

Its impressive how this movie starts off already crazy and gets more and more insane the farther the Boats gets upriver to the point that Kurtz' compound just feels like *Hell*.

Dennis Hopper (the photographer/journalist) has always been very good at playing odd and/or insane characters in my small opinion.

That movie where Martin Sheen got ridiculously hammered in the hotel room, but Francis Ford Coppola said, "Let's just go with it", and Dennis Hopper was so high during the entire shoot he said years later he had no memory about making this movie. I guess there's no smell quite like coke in the morning.

The villainy of the US Army in the Vietnam War is so well portrayed here. The 'routine check' of the riverboat scene is one of my favorite moments of the film and the underlining of the grotesque lie of it all ("cutting a man in half with a machine gun and then giving them a bandaid") is what makes Kurtz such a horrifying monster at the end of the journey. Because he's right. And that's why the brass wants him gone - Kurtz has dropped the facade of righteousness and justification that the military is deluding itself with, and reveals the primal horror of what we were actually there to do.

He wasn't insane, he took war to its maximum conclusion. No remorse, no fear, no moral high ground, because no such things exist, it is a creation of leaders who justify evil to make war chivalrous. This was an antiwar movie.