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.
It took me several viewings of the theatrical version to even begin to appreciate what a masterpiece this film was. 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 performing Playboy Bunnies especially flown in, whilst others were flattening nearby Vietnamese villages just seems so, well, f*cked up, basically.
The Final Cut with it's 4K remaster is something to behold. 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 sound system too via the intense Dolby Atmos soundtrack.
And as for that 'Wagner - death from above sequence'...Wow! Just wow!!! It's a stunning piece of film making from the beautiful way Coppola frames the composition to the roar of helicopters in and out of the speakers. Truly one of the greatest sequences in the history of cinema.
It's during the final half hour when Martin Sheen's Captain Willard reaches his goal of finding the jungle habitat of Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz that the film ventures into woozy horror territory. It's a last act that feels like the grungiest of Italian cannibal films and the murder of Kurtz intercut with the sacrifice of a cow is sickening to see. Don't do what i did and look into the cow's eyes as it's neck is being hacked by machete swipes. It's f*cking obvious it's real and all the more harrowing.
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