Chiasmus cult cinema trailers - "Apocalypse now" (1979). *These will be ongoing posts, courtesy of the A.Glass DVD collection. As I offer via Chiasmus Cult trailers, my summarized overviews*

"Apocalypse Now" is probably the only big budget movie,which encapsulates a time in cinemagraphic history that is of the late 1970s risque of exploitation cinema, where experimental and shock value assisted in setting the tone, and of the course the marketing on the many low budget movies that went straight to the local 'Drive In', soley as Grindhouse productions.  Yet,  Apocalypse Now, despite the bases of its massive production as an 'exploitation' blockbuster, is Francis Ford Coppola's 'War' movie, that is one long descent into madness.  Literally.

Written by screenwriter John Frederick Milius, who was encouraged by Coppola, to modernize the 1899 novel "Hearts of Darkness" (Joseph Conrad), into a multilayered screenplay, very much like the novella, the theme of the story being an Ivory Trader called "Kurtz" who has gone insane within the jungles of the Congo, representing the madness of war, that being the Vietnam War.   For Milius's screenplay, 'Kurtz' of Hearts of Darkness, became, "Colonel Walter E. Kurtz" (played with a detached enthusiasm by the late Marlon Brando), holled up in the depths of a Cambodian jungle, commanding in a god like like demeanor, tribes people and a few Americans seduced by his madness, that he could win the Vietnam war, with his own branded 'horror' against the horrors of war (apparently real dead bodies were used by Coppola on set, representing Kurtz's' brutality against the Viet Cong).  Loosely based on an actual person called "Tony Poe" who as a covert CIA paramilitary operative who commanded tribal people in Laos, who had them cut the heads and ears off North Vietnamese soldiers operating within the Laos jungles.

But, it would be Coppola's complexity with the storytelling and direction of Apocalypse Now which would define the movie as unique as a war drama, rather than being accurate to the events of the Vietnam War, it is, as mentioned a movie about the madness of war and the fragile human psyche.  With the beginning of the Apocalypse Now opening with the Doors "The End", showing Kurtz's would be assassin "Captain Willard", played by Martin Sheen, already falling into a drunken psychosis, which apparently occurred for real, whilst awaiting his mission, punching a mirror, bleeding all over the place.  Encouraged by Coppola to magnify the intensity of what he what he wanted to portray with this project, to the extent that Sheen suffered a heart attack on location in the Philippines.

Coppola's and Milius's Apocalypse Now, was a take on the hippie esque "Nirvana Now", reflected on how the 1960s had passed, while the hedonic of the 1970s continued on into the 1980s, and so did the artistic expression that offered more frightening aspects of our world than peaceful ones, as the threat of thermonuclear destruction reached a peak, so did the storytelling of the era, that the end is nigh. Apocalypse Now is essentially a doomsday movie, which appears, as a production, cursed from the start, from the sets being destroyed by a typhoon, drug taking on set, from cocaine, used by Coppola and the actors, and LSD, with actors falling in and out of psychosis, pushed to the limit by Coppola, who was  also close to collapsing into a nervous breakdown when the production ended on May 1st 1977.

Apocalypse Now turned 46 this year, and will remain as movie that you'll never see the likes of again, despite the various Coppola versions, the original 1979 version is ultimately the best.  An unrelenting, brutal, beautifully shot, cinematic mess.  But it works, and telling of what the French poet Charles Baudelaire (d1867) once said, on how madness is always ever close, particularly in times of war, malice and turmoil “Today I felt pass over me a breath of wind from the wings of madness."

___

(A.Glass 2025)

All CHIAMUS Cult Cinema trailers/commentary to date: chiasmusmagazine.blogspot.com/search/label/Chiasmus%20cult%20cinema