War stories

"Pearl Harbor." "Saving Private Ryan." "The Thin Red Line." And now "Apocalypse Now Redux," a newly expanded version of Francis Ford Coppola's legendary 1979 epic on the horrors of Vietnam.

War movies are clearly back in style. Or would it be more accurate to say they never left?

In fact, war has been a favorite subject of filmmakers since cinema began. But just because a genre is old doesn't mean audiences will keep lining up for it. Westerns have bitten the dust, and traditional musicals have danced into near oblivion.

Why do war movies keep parading across movie screens despite shifts in social attitudes and Hollywood fashions? Three answers stand out.

• War films are a flexible genre, making chameleonlike changes in response to current moods. Think of the leap from "The Green Berets," which celebrated the Vietnam war in 1968, to "The Deer Hunter," which questioned its morality 10 years later.

• Stories about war appeal to our nostalgic instincts, satisfying the urge to revisit bygone times - and refight bygone battles.

"Sir, do we get to win this time?" asks Sylvester Stallone as a veteran heading back to Vietnam in "Rambo: First Blood Part II."

• War movies have a built-in affinity for melodramatic stories and action-packed images - elements of cinema that promise box-office gold when packaged and promoted in aggressive (or belligerent?) ways. Think of Steven Spielberg's 1998 "Private Ryan," the most popular war movie of the past decade and a good illustration of what makes the genre resonate with today's audiences.

Its story focuses on World War II, remembered by most Americans as a "good war" that justified great expenditures of lives and resources. The film erupts with action (vivid combat sequences) and throbs with melodrama (the selfless quest to ease a mother's grief) from start to finish.

While it follows well-worn Hollywood formulas, it freshens them by escalating the violence, especially in its blood-soaked D-Day scene. It also steals a trick from Spielberg's earlier "Schindler's List" by tacking on a modern-day prologue and epilogue that heighten the "real life" overtones of this fictional story.

The box-office fortunes of "Apocalypse Now Redux" will reveal much about today's attitude toward war movies. Although 22 years have passed since the film's first release, it still seems experimental in its outlook and philosophical in its ideas. Coppola wanted to revise Hollywood conventions in the '70s - he did this for crime pictures in his first two "Godfather" films - and here he asked audiences not just to view the chaos and confusion of war, but to think about the human impact of its body-crushing violence and spirit-numbing absurdity.

Terrence Malick sought a similar goal through different means in "The Thin Red Line," earning critical praise but lackluster financial returns. This demonstrates how much more conservative - cinematically and politically - general audiences had become in the two decades since "Apocalypse Now" debuted. Malick's movie also sold fewer tickets than "Saving Private Ryan," its competitor in multiplexes and the Academy Awards race. Spielberg's victory was surely connected with his canny decision to inject a larger degree of guts-and-glory heroics than Malick's more contemplative approach allowed.

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