Apocalypse Now: Final Cut at HOME

Frances Ford Coppola’s (The Godfather) brutal trip into the heart of darkness nearly ruined the director. The 1979 Vietnam epic is rightly regarded as a classic today, and screens restored and respected in 4K at HOME this summer. But the gruelling, out of control production in Cambodia is the stuff of legend, captured for all to see by the director’s wife Eleanor Coppola in her notorious making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.

The film follows Martin Sheen plays Captain Willard, a soldier sent deep into the jungle charged with killing Marlon Brando’s renegade Colonel Kurtz. Working from Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, which depicts 19th Century Belgian atrocities on the Congo River, Coppola builds a near-mythic framework that shows the horror of American excess, lawlessness, and insanity in Vietnam. By freeing the film from the specifics of the war in Vietnam the director is better able to convey its mad, rotten spirit, lining up iconic scene after iconic scene as he Willard drives further into the forest.

From the helicopter attack on a village set to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”, to the surreal Playboy bunny camp visit, and the final arrival at Colonel Kurtz’s hellish compound, Apocalypse Now combines hallucinatory imagery, bone-shaking bombast, and a killer rock ‘n’ roll score into one of the defining pictures of seventies cinema. If you haven’t seen this film on the big screen before then strap in and brace yourself, there’s nothing else quite like it.