DVD review: Apocalypse Now Blu-Ray
IT'S one of the great misconceptions that Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is an anti-war film. With its fascistic imagery (all those poetically filmed scene of napalmed jungles), Wagner soundtracked airstrikes and authoritarian characters, it's one of the most celebratory, pro-war movies ever made. It's also still the best, a film that captures the chaos of conflict in all its surreal, hallucinatory glory and which, thanks to the way it was made and the circumstances surrounding the war it reflects, will never be equalled in terms of sheer craziness of ambition, scale and artistic achievement.
Though it has been packaged and repackaged multiple times over the years, this three-disc Blu-ray release does actually justify re-investment, not least for the picture quality alone, which is so pin-sharp it makes even the hitherto unreadable slogans on Kilgore's helicopters (Death from Above) look like they've been written in ten-foot-tall letters of fire.
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Hide AdThe film comes in both its 1979 and extended, inferior Redux version, and there's a cleaned-up copy of Hearts of Darkness, the ultimate making-of doc compiled largely from Eleanor Coppola's video diaries charting her husband's crack-up in the Philippines where the arduous, health-threatening, bankruptcy-catalysing shoot took place. But it's the treasure trove of new extras that will be of most interest to aficionados, chief among them some fascinating and revealing sit-down interviews between Coppola and his key collaborators.
Of course, old anecdotes are retold, but there are a lot of fresh insights and myth-enhancing tales. In the studio where they recorded the haunting voice-over narration that Dispatches author Michael Herr scripted for the film, Sheen reminds Coppola of the loaded gun that a burned-out veteran, whom Coppola had brought along to the session, started waving around. Elsewhere, there's a fascinating chat between Coppola and screenwriter John Milius where the director talks of being at film school with Jim Morrison (hence the use of The Doors music over the opening credits). He also graciously deflects much of the praise that has been heaped on him in the years since back onto Milius, who not only came up with the idea of adapting Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but coined the phrase Apocalypse Now (a term he came up with to rile hippies), and conceived of the Ride of the Valkyries scene after becoming a mountain man in Colorado and listening to Wagner non-stop.
• To order this DVD, call The Scotsman on 01634 832789.