Perhaps the best war film ever made. A grim depiction of the reality of the Vietnam War and how it brutalised American soldiers fighting for a lost cause.
It is the height of the war in Vietnam, and U.S. Army Captain Willard is sent by Colonel Lucas and a General to carry out a mission that, officially, 'does not exist - nor will it ever exist'. The mission: To seek out a mysterious Green Beret Colonel, Walter Kurtz, whose army has crossed the border into Cambodia and is conducting hit-and-run missions against the Viet Cong and NVA. The army believes Kurtz has gone completely insane and Willard's job is to eliminate him!
APOCALYPSE NOW
Simultaneously brilliant and bizarre, Francis Ford Coppola's sprawling, Vietnam-era adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness -- having enthralled some viewers while befuddling others -- henceforth will occupy a loftier position in the director's oeuvre. This fanciful, extravagantly produced excoriation of US involvement in the Vietnam war is finally in the form Coppola originally intended with the addition of heretofore unseen sequences that bring the total running time to well over three hours.
Redux, however, doesn't alter the story's basic structure: Army assassin Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) leads a Navy patrol boat upriver, penetrating deep into Cambodia to locate the village sanctuary of rogue colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) -- a war-maddened megalomaniac whom Willard has been ordered to terminate with extreme prejudice. The newly restored sequences include a lengthy stopover with French plantation owners who cling futilely to their decadent, aristocratic lifestyle in the face of chaos and carnage; and a darkly humorous dalliance with visiting Playboy Playmates, who offer to trade sex for the gasoline needed to fuel their downed helicopter.
Coppola also reorders some scenes and adds snippets to others, ultimately transforming Apocalypse into a more cohesive, dramatically satisfying film. Still episodic and unevenly paced, with the same odd juxtaposition of hyper-realistic action and surreal symbolism, this revised edition nonetheless has a depth and texture the familiar version lacked.
A masterful achievement, overshadowed only by Coppola's first two Godfather films, Apocalypse Now Redux finally restores the luster to this formidable director's tarnished reputation. It's a film no serious movie fan should be without.
CAST
Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, M. Brando
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Greatest War Movies
TRAILER
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-- George Santayana
History Quotes
May 1945 - If hell on earth existed, than it existed in Prague after May the 5th. 1945. Old men, women and children were beaten to death and maimed. Rapes, barbaric cruelties, horror-scenarios of hellish proportions - here they had been let lose.
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"History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are."
-- DAVID C. MCCULLOUGH
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
-- MARY ANGELOU
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HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
-- Ambrose Bierce
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
-- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
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"I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past."
--EDWARD GIBBON
"Patriotism ruins history."
-- GOETHE
Snippets from History
This short but important battle played a key role in the decision to use atomic bombs when attacking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The battle showed just how far Japanese troops would go to defend their country.
Snippets From History
Paulus didn't give the order to 6th Army to surrender, but his troops no longer had much fight left in them. Resistance faded out over the next two days, with the last die-hards finally calling it quits. One Red Army colonel shouted at a group of prisoners, waving at the ruins all around them: "That's how Berlin is going to look!
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History is Philosophy teaching by examples.
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Points to Ponder: Why Is China Unstable?
The aim of individuals in any society is money and power. Societies that give equal chance to all its members to get them will be the most stable. That is why democracies are more stable than other systems of governance.
China after Deng's reform gave the chance to get rich but power is in the hands of an elite; the Communist Party of China. Membership to the party is at the whims of the local party bosses. This leaves out many people who crave political power dissatisfied and disgruntled. There in lies the roots of instability. The Party suppressed these demands once at Tiananmen in 1989. But force is hardly the way to deal with things like these.
READ MORE: Tiananmen Square Massacre
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