When this movie was released in 1979, the term "post traumatic stress disorder" was rarely used, certainly not nearly as often as it is today, to describe the emotional anxieties endured by battle-weary soldiers who had returned from the jungles of Vietnam. It seems today that APOCALYPSE,NOW!, large chunks of it anyway, illustrate the effects of this disorder on the characters,situations and most especially the atmosphere and tone of the work. Perhaps this is the reason it resonated so strongly with some viewers at the time, despite its unsatisfying concluding moments that failed to deliver the big action moment many hoped would end the film. Instead, Coppola leaves us in a heart of darkness, stuck as it were, in a state of mind from which escape seems impossible. Not only does the movie not give us an exhilarating battle scene to match the helicopter attack seen earlier, it doesn't even give its characters a rescue or deliverance, and certainly not a homecoming. Where another fil-maker might have inserted a psychologist to comment on the awful anxieties the men might be going through, Coppola shows in nearly every scene
the insanity of their surroundings and the twisted world of war in which they live. He succeeds in using his film to immerse the audience as much as possible in the hell this war created in the minds of the veterans forced to endure it.
There have been four great films about that war: The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Coming Home, and this one - but it is this one, Coppola's, that seems most personal.
Review of Apocalypse Now
