Apocalypse Now (1998, VHS)

The Nail That Sticks Up Gets Hammered Down. Japanese proverb Burned-out Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) gets selected for a special mission: go up the Nung River to Cambodia and assassinate Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando). It seems the Army wants Col. Kurtz for murder. He terminated four South Vietnamese citizens, who he correctly thought were Vietcong secret agents. VC activity has come to a virtual standstill in his sector since the killings. Still, the powers-that-be are uncomfortable with a man that takes the bull by the horns The sleazy, political general (G. D. Spradlin)...

..."I love the smell of napalm in the morning...."... Duvall I graduated from high school in 1964, that was not a good time for young men and women to be starting out on their own. Back then, like now, it was cool to be serving your country on the battle front. Many of my classmates signed on the dotted line before graduation and as soon as they took off that cap and gown they put on those fatigues. Many, way too many, never walked back on American soil again. Within a year or so it became very uncool to be serving in this conflict. This review is dedicated to my fellow 373 classmates that...

Francis Ford Coppola s original 1979 version of Apocalypse Now is a dark, sardonic, surrealistic yet mesmerizing reworking of Joseph Conrad s novel Heart of Darkness. Starring Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Fredric Forrest, Larry Fishbourne, and Dennis Hopper, Apocalypse Now trades Conrad s African setting for the then-still largely unexplored (by Hollywood, anyway) jungles of Vietnam. The film s premise is deceptively simple. A hard-bitten, combat-weary Capt. Benjamin Willard (Sheen) is given a difficult (and highly classified) assignment: he is to travel up a long Vietnamese...

There are some movies that effect you emotionally, and there are some that illicit no response and you go on with your life. Movies like Jaws and Alien make you terrified of doing things you before thought of as normal. They give you a sense of dread that expands in your stomach as the movie continues. Apocalypse Now has that same effect on the viewer; you just know that something bad or evil is going to happen at the end of the movie; but you are kept in suspense the whole time. For a long time this movie had held a certain mystique for me. It was always that creepy weird war movie with the..