4K Final Cut is the ultimate cut. It's reduced Redux. It's perfect. Beautiful. One of the best cinematic experiences ever.
Someone please explain the ending of Apocalypse Now to me
- Thread starter Firemind
- Start date
4K Final Cut is the ultimate cut. It's reduced Redux. It's perfect. Beautiful. One of the best cinematic experiences ever.
Kurtz is tired of his whole existence, and he's waiting for Willard to be his errand boy, just as he's the errand boy for the USM.
What he wants is - and he says this - to die like a soldier, and you see this with him standing up before Willard's last blow.
Everything about the movie can be seen as an allegory for the US in Vietnam, be it the story or its production.
I mean, did the guy who you listen to in the briefing scene seem like an ultimate badass to you? He's broken, broken by himself, by his experience of seeing the pile of children's arms, by the hypocrisy of being called a murderer for killing the VC agents (the intel Willard reads while on the boat) without permission...
The whole war against communism was a colonial project. Colonialism isn't just about owning territory.
What he wants is - and he says this - to die like a soldier, and you see this with him standing up before Willard's last blow.
Everything about the movie can be seen as an allegory for the US in Vietnam, be it the story or its production.
I mean, did the guy who you listen to in the briefing scene seem like an ultimate badass to you? He's broken, broken by himself, by his experience of seeing the pile of children's arms, by the hypocrisy of being called a murderer for killing the VC agents (the intel Willard reads while on the boat) without permission...
The whole war against communism was a colonial project. Colonialism isn't just about owning territory.
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Yeah, if you look at it as an adventure epic escalating by going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, the ending is sufficient enough. As an antiwar movie, I dunno.
I thought the lie was more in the morality of war. The media (they even had a camera crew filming the military's deeds), the military leaders, the CIA who wants him dead, keep saying how morally superior they are. Which is what Kurtz challenges. What he did is not morally wrong. Or at least not less moral than what they're selling the lie as.
Thank you for your insight.
Haha
The film shows you all the horror, stupidity and hypocrisy of war and you're not sure it works as an anti-war film?
First, Redux is fine screw the haters. Second, if you watch the film and expected some epic confrontation then you sorely misread the film.
Also you get to see Kurtz being a badass assassin when he kills chef and throws his head at Willard's feet when he's imprisoned in the bamboo cage
i feel like not only did you miss the point of the movie, most of the people commenting in this thread missed it too.
Kurtz had reached a state of mind and existence where he had been eclipsed by the darkness he had been sent into, and knew deep down he had become the horror that he had initially been sent to stop. When it came time for his life to end, he accepted it and embraced it, finally admitting to himself of the horrors and atrocities he had wrapped around himself for so long.
Kurtz had reached a state of mind and existence where he had been eclipsed by the darkness he had been sent into, and knew deep down he had become the horror that he had initially been sent to stop. When it came time for his life to end, he accepted it and embraced it, finally admitting to himself of the horrors and atrocities he had wrapped around himself for so long.
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The ending, which what I was talking about, no, not really.
"The third act, or resolution, is when the problem in the story boils over, forcing the characters to confront it, allowing all the elements of the story to come together and inevitably leading to the ending."
It's fine as a closure of Willard's and Kurtz's journey, but other than that, eh.
Been meaning to catch Apocalypse Now for awhile.
...is that animal slaughter shown in every cut, or is there one where I can avoid that?
Also, read The Heart of Darkness.
...is that animal slaughter shown in every cut, or is there one where I can avoid that?
Also, read The Heart of Darkness.
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He still brutally murdered Chef though. Maybe it's because he was the only sane character left in the movie. It could be a metaphor that war kills us all, both figuratively and literally. Poor puppy.
Just the inferior cuts.
Theatrical is widely accepted to be the best cut.
Redux came some time later and added a bunch of scenes that people are mixed to negative on.
Final Cut came out less than a year ago and cuts down from Redux but still has a bunch of scenes people don't like.
It's plausible in some reality they made a new cut that's better than theatrical, because a workprint that includes a ton of scenes that got deleted (it's over four hours long iirc) got leaked out in pretty poor quality. Some of those scenes are fan favorites, but the rumor is most of the unused film was lost or destroyed, which is why the Final Cut didn't include anything new.
He killed Chef because he was trying to push Willard to the edge and try to impart on him the "truths" he had come to know. But afterwards, he let Willard walk the compound freely knowing that either Willard would join him (and if so, Kurtz had failed to make Willard into the tool he was hoping for) or that Willard would kill him, which is what happened. I also read the boat leaving in the end as Willard going further down the river, because at this point Kurtz has been ended but Willard is the ultimate result of the madness that consumed Kurtz, and Kurtz's lasting legacy.
Wait, they actually killed a cow in that scene? Like, it was alive and then dead?? What the fuck
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A water buffalo, yes. I wish they didn't. It adds nothing to the movie.
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Both Willard and Chef agreed on the boat that Kurtz must be stopped though. Willard even showed Chef how to call in an air strike. I thought that was the reason he killed him.
The going further down the river makes sense, as he doesn't respond to the radio several times, even going as far as saying in one of his monologues that he's not in the army anymore. I still think he goes to civilization to save Lance though.
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It was a water buffalo, but yet. That gif is the actual death of that beast. There's conflicting stuff about what happened though. An article once stated the ritual was completely staged and that everyone was tasked to do as you see in the film. However Coppola has said on multiple occasions, including as recent as the release of The Final Cut, that the tribe was going to sacrifice the buffalo anyway, so they decided to set up a few cameras and to film it, see what they could do with the footage.
Which is the resolution to the story.
What were you expecting, some speech about how war is bad? Did the previous 2 hours not deliver a clear enough message?
The ending absolutely had it's desired effect on me. I was lucky enough to actually see an actual print during film school so I was just a wide eyed teen who hadn't seen anything like it, and I suppose I still haven't. The ending was extremely chilling and haunting to me, from Kurt'z final words to the actual water buffalo slaughter to the fact that there are no credits, it just goes black, it all worked for me. i also remember whoever was responsible for turning the lights back on in the theater, didn't, and a lot of us just sat in total darkness and silence shellshocked.
Definitely opened my mind to what a film/art can do when it defies standard convention and expectations, I only knew Apocalypse Now as "that vietnam movie" going into the theater, and I won't lie, initially I think I assumed it would go for the cliche climactic battle like the OP did, but luckily it didn't.
Definitely opened my mind to what a film/art can do when it defies standard convention and expectations, I only knew Apocalypse Now as "that vietnam movie" going into the theater, and I won't lie, initially I think I assumed it would go for the cliche climactic battle like the OP did, but luckily it didn't.
Iirc Heart of Darkness is about how our civility is a thin veneer hiding what we really are, which is cruel and ruthless animals. The journey down the river (the book is in the Congo I think?) is a metaphor for a journey to the heart of humanity which is our capacity for inflicting pain. Kurtz is a man who breaks under what he has done and how he felt doing it. He sees what humanity is at it's core, hence "the horror".
Vietnam is a fitting location because the US went there under sketchy circumstances (though I'm not really familiar with the whole thing).
I feel a better ending would have been some of the locals getting annoyed with the foreigners, leading to infighting among them, total chaos, and leading to Kurtz's murder by his own "worshipers".
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I like the interpretation of the killing of Kurtz/water buffalo representing the killing of the Minotaur at the center of the maze. The Minotaur being the symbol of humanity's arrogance towards the gods. The river and the maze being similar images of a descent into the subconscious and the darkest parts of our minds.
Then again you watch "Hearts of darkness" and realize that FFC simply filmed a local tribe's sacrifice of a water buffalo and thought it would be cool to put in the movie (on top of showing a real animal getting killed on film being a bit fucked up).
Wait are you for real? The rise of the valkyries scene is not meant to be "oh cool look at these cool dudes doing cool stuff" lol
It's also about the multiplicity of humans and the uncertainty of a singular perspective. The whole boat trip up, we're told all these different stories of Kurtz, and the man we finally meet isn't really like any of the stories, and yet he was those things to those people at that time.
Kurtz was driven bat shit insane by his experiences. He dropped out, and the top brass feared what he knew and what he'd do, hence sending in Willard to tidy up. Sadly Willard was already starting down the same path, and the journey to find Kurtz nearly finished him off, making him vulnerable to Kurtz's story. Kurtz (too fucked up move on, (physically and mentally) sought a younger version of himself to either take over there or preferably to go back and spread his beliefs further. After sacrificing Kurtz, Willard appears to reject the violence, but we don't know what happened next. I found it very cthulhuesque in it's own way.
What!? Synecdoche dude! By cross-cutting between the slaughter/sacrifice of the water buffalo with that of Kurtz, the scene is elevated beyond what it could have been without.
You already have the visceral visual information that the weapon that Willard is holding is something very deadly and each blow he deals to Kurtz is doing some serious damage.
Then there the whole metaphorical effect of sacrifice, slaughter etc which takes it to another level.
There's more to a movie than just plot.
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