Coppola's 'Apocalypse' still relevant now

Major wars are fought and won in far less time.

It's taken 22 years for Francis Ford Coppola to bring his Vietnam epic "Apocalypse Now" to theaters in the full-length version he always preferred.

The new edition, "Apocalypse Now Redux," is 53 minutes longer than the 1979 original. It's also more effective, since Coppola has reedited the entire film into a more flowing and coherent form.

The restored material does cause occasional problems, as when a talky scene on a French plantation in Vietnam slows the action not long before the climax and injects a romantic angle that seems tacked onto the story. But the bombastic "Pearl Harbor" took almost as much time to offer far less substance, so audiences may not mind "Redux's" three-hours-plus length. In my view, its vivid images, passionate performances, and incendiary ideas place it among the few must-see releases in recent memory.

The plot, inspired by Joseph Conrad's haunting 1898 novella "Heart of Darkness," remains the same. Martin Sheen plays Willard, an American soldier who's ordered to travel upriver through the Vietnam jungle in search of Colonel Kurtz, a maverick officer (Marlon Brando) who's gone insane and set up a self-governed kingdom ruled by terror, torture, and death.

Willard's job is to seek out and assassinate Kurtz, using military resources but keeping his mission a secret until the end. His journey takes him through a microcosm of the Vietnam war, from the chaos of blood-spilling combat to the confusion of mind-churning drugs and the desperation of men risking life and limb for a cause nobody seems able to explain.

Through it all runs the apocalyptic metaphor that shapes Conrad's dark narrative, suggesting that the quest to understand human nature may end in a nightmare no civilized mind could comprehend.

Coppola started making "Apocalypse Now" in the middle 1970s, an adventurous period when he was an internationally renowned director. He expected this action-movie production to be a refreshing change from the claustrophobic intensity of his "Godfather" projects, but a string of practical problems - Sheen's health, Brando's ego, a walloping monsoon in the Philippines jungle where they were shooting - broke its momentum and ballooned its budget.

Eager to recoup his costs, Coppola feared alienating audiences with an overlong movie containing too much talk or philosophizing, so he removed several scenes he didn't find essential to the picture's overall impact.

These are the episodes "Redux" restores:

• More views of Willard and his companions as they prepare for their dangerous journey in a fog of uncertainty and apprehension.

• A sexually charged episode where Willard meets American prostitutes on a stranded helicopter.

• A fascinating scene where Kurtz appears in daylight - the original version only showed him in shadows of night - and lectures Willard about the lies he's detected in a Time magazine article about the war.

• Most important, the French plantation sequence, which hinders the movie's pace but provides a sophisticated analysis of the war from the perspective of Vietnam's former colonists.

The message is crystallized when a French patriarch asserts that France had cultural and economic reasons for fighting to keep Vietnam within its grasp - unlike the United States, which is wasting lives and treasure to capture "the biggest nothing in history."

Coppola's career reached its highest point in the '70s, and "Apocalypse Now" stands with his most important achievements.

The expanded "Redux" is even more resonant - partly because of its added material, and partly because the passage of time has increased the film's value as a key cultural document of the Vietnam War era and its aftermath. It's a movie not to be missed.

Rated R; 'Apocalypse Now Redux' contains graphic violence, drug use, nudity, and foul language.