Apocalypse Now – The Final Cut
Remastered version of Francis Ford Coppola’s war classic, released five years ago to mark the 40th anniversary of the film.
Nominated for eight Oscars back then, the masterpiece APOCALYPSE NOW is a riveting epic about the Vietnam War, based on Joseph Conrad’s book HEART OF DARKNESS. Martin Sheen plays the role of army officer Willard, a man sent on a dangerous odyssey to Cambodia to assassinate a renegade American colonel named Kurtz. Kurtz has succumbed to the horrors of war and barricaded himself in a remote outpost.
Although Coppola already had two GODFATHER films on his résumé, he was still only 36 when he travelled to the Philippines in 1976 for what would become one of the most legendary shoots in film history. Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack during filming, cast and crew were taking huge amounts of drugs, the sets were wiped out by a hurricane, Marlon Brando arrived on set unprepared and grossly overweight, the budget overruns were huge. Despite – or perhaps because of all these setbacks – APOCALYPSE NOW became a masterpiece; a hallucinatory trip full of surreal images that makes the madness of the Vietnam War palpable. The film won the Golden Palm at Cannes.