(2 of 3)
Unfortunately, the director never does get around to telling the story of either character's personal apocalypse. Instead, he uses part of Willard's river journey as a pretext to unveil a series of large-scale, self-contained set pieces—an impersonal tour of the war front. Though these sequences do not add up to a movie, they are feverishly imagined and brilliantly shot (by Bertolucci's favorite cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro). Indeed, the first of these war scenes may be the most spectacular battle ever created for a film. With a megalomaniacal officer (Robert Duvall) leading the charge, a cavalry of American helicopters wipes out an entire Vietnamese village. The display of aerial hardware is immense, the rush of explosions dizzying. Duvall's tough but nutty commander would do justice to Joseph Heller: as bullets whiz by him on all sides, he engages his men in an obsessive debate about surfing.
Shocks of a more surreal nature follow. When Willard meets up with a bump-and-grind U.S.O. show in the proverbial middle of nowhere, Coppola creates a haunting spectacle of corrupt American values loose in an alien world. Later, Willard encounters a platoon of spaced-out black G.I.s who are shooting aimlessly into the night without benefit of a commanding officer. "It's the asshole of the world," says one fleeing soldier. Coppola's eerie visions, sculpted out of smoke, fire and darkness, make the words real.
Yet such is the nature of the entire film that even these hallucinatory passages are not so powerful as they might be. At times they are as anesthetizing as the Viet Nam footage that once dominated TV's evening newscasts. What is missing from these panoramas of death is a human context. There are almost no well-defined characters in Apocalypse Now. The biggest nonentity of all, sadly enough, is Willard. We are supposed to see the movie through his eyes—which are frequently superimposed on the film's images—but those eyes tell us nothing. It is not Sheen's fault; no one has written him a role. He is neither the initially innocent traveler of Conrad's fiction (where the character was called Marlow) nor a hardened assassin.
Perhaps if Coppola had succeeded in his efforts to recruit a star for the part, Willard might have commanded an audience's interest and empathy by sheer force of personal magnetism. Having no star, the director tried a more desperate solution: he commissioned Journalist Michael Herr (Dispatches) to write a narration that attempts to fill in Willard's personality ex post facto on the sound track. That narration—alternately sensitive, psychopathic, literary, gung-ho and antiwar—is self-contradictory and often at odds with Willard's behavior. It does not establish the protagonist as a credible figure or begin to achieve Coppola's loftier goal of charting Willard's tailspin into psychological terror. Eventually, the voice-over commentary becomes a makeshift panacea for the film's many other defects: it hastily clarifies plot points and states themes that Coppola has uncharacteristically failed to develop through action, dialogue and pictures. This strategy is as hopeless as trying to glue together a $30 million airplane with wads of bubble gum.