Apocalypse Now (1979)
The Final Cut. - Clocking in at a good twenty minutes shorter than the Redux version released in 2001, the Final Cut, released and remastered in 2019, at just over three hours is director Francis Ford Coppola's preferred version, although i'm not sure that it's mine.
It took me several viewings of the theatrical version to even begin to appreciate what a masterpiece this film was and the 2001 Redux added so much more to the movie. Whilst it's obvious that Coppola clearly found some scenes redundant i always liked the idea that we were getting the full story allowing us to make up our own minds about events portrayed. Apocalypse Now never seemed like a movie, especially the first two hours, it feels like a 'look at life' in war torn Vietnam, albeit a look at life from the invading American point of view with the horrors and indeed frivolities of war there for all to see. The idea of troops surfing the waves and ogling Playboy Bunnies whilst others were flattening nearby Vietnamese villages just seems so, well, f*cked up, basically.
Having said that this Final Cut with it's 4K remaster is something to behold, even in upscaled dvd mode. Not only can Robert Duvall's Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore love the smell of Napalm in the morning, in 4K he can hear it decimate his 5:1 sound system too.
And as for that 'Wagner death from the sky sequence'...Wow! Just wow!!!
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