Palm trees stand still in the heat. Then the tree line dissolves into a wall of orange fire, the slow chop of rotor blades bleeds into the hum of a ceiling fan, and a man lies sweating in a Saigon hotel room with the war already running behind his eyes. Apocalypse Now announces its method in its first minute: this will be a controlled hallucination, sound folded into image until the jungle and the inside of a skull become the same place.

The story is a straight line and the film is anything but. Captain Willard is ordered up a river toward Cambodia to find Colonel Kurtz, a decorated officer who has slipped past the army’s reach and set himself up as a god among the people he was sent to fight. Francis Ford Coppola took Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and floated it down a tropical river in wartime; the journey upriver becomes the architecture of the whole picture, each bend a deeper descent, each stop a little further from any world that still makes sense.

Light and sound

This is where the film stands alone. Vittorio Storaro shot it in smoke and saturated color — magnesium dawns, violet dusks, faces lit by flares and burning fuel — and Walter Murch built one of cinema’s first true surround mixes around it, so the helicopters seem to cross the room above your head. The assault on the coastal village, flown in to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries blaring from loudspeakers bolted to the gunships, is still the most exhilarating and obscene set-piece of its kind, Robert Duvall’s Kilgore strolling upright through the explosions to deliver the line everyone remembers about the smell of napalm. The image carries the argument; the sound finishes it.

The river

Coppola builds the descent as a series of stations — a tiger in the green, a sampan searched and then massacred over a hidden puppy, a USO show that collapses into a stampede, a bridge lit like a fairground at the end of the world where no soldier can name the officer in charge. Martin Sheen carries it inward, his Willard narrowing from soldier to witness to something colder, while Sam Bottoms, Frederic Forrest, Laurence Fishburne and Albert Hall crew a boat full of men being quietly used up. The closer the water gets to Kurtz, the less the war is willing to explain itself.

A scene from Apocalypse Now (1979), directed by Francis Ford Coppola — Apocalypse Now (1979), directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Kurtz, and the dark at the end

Then Marlon Brando arrives, vast and half-seen, and the film changes temperature. Faced with an actor who turned up overweight and unprepared, Coppola made the problem the aesthetic — burying Kurtz in shadow, letting a bald head surface out of the black while a low voice murmurs about horror. The compound sequence is the film’s most argued stretch: to some a hypnotic descent into myth, to others a becalmed, over-philosophized anticlimax after the propulsion of the river. The making of it became its own legend — a typhoon that flattened the sets, Sheen’s heart attack, helicopters recalled mid-take to fight a real insurgency — later laid bare in the documentary Hearts of Darkness.

Why it still earns the score

The honest reservation is the one the film hands you itself: the Kurtz section sheds the awful momentum of everything before it, and Brando’s improvised murk can tip from profound to merely obscure. Set against what the picture does with image and sound, though, the complaint is small. No war film since has been photographed or mixed like this, and none has staged the slow conversion of a man into a weapon — and then into a witness — with such beauty and such dread. It remains essential.

Apocalypse Now was released in 1979, directed by Francis Ford Coppola from a screenplay he wrote with John Milius, with narration written by Michael Herr, loosely adapted from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne and Dennis Hopper head the cast. Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography and the film’s sound each won an Academy Award, and the film shared the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.