Apocalypse Now

So I *thought* I had seen this film before, but embarrassingly enough it was The Deer Hunter that I was thinking of (duh!). It was a pleasant surpise to find out about halfway through that I was actually watching a film I'd never seen before!

I've heard a lot about Apocalypse Now, and it did live up to the expectations I had for it. The cinematography was indeed brilliant. It was a perfect film to watch after The Diving Bell and the Butterfly because it shows a completely different aspect of cinematography. While Diving Bell was all about the point of view shot, Apocalypse Now revealed much wider, larger shots. The colors are what captured my eyes the most. Different scenes had different color hues, such as the first war scene, which had an orange-y glow to it (I actually noticed this before you pointed out the "blue" jungle scene, Kevin!). I also loved the colorful flares throughout the film. I don't exactly know what the significance was behind them, but I found them to be beautiful bursts of color among a war-consumed Vietnam.

The scene that was most effective for me was when the multitudes of helicopters headed to claim their next village. The black shadows of the helicopters all in a row gave me the impression of a swarm of locusts headed to engulf their next meal. And, sure enough, I was right.

There's so much more that caught my eye: the sweat dropping off Willard's nose, the crescent of Kurtz's face when we are first introduced to him, the appearance of a Kurtz's "kingdom"....these are just some of the images that keep running through my mind when I think of this film.

Oh, and let me just say that my favorite character in the film by far was Lieut. Colonel Kilgore played by Robert Duvall. I can't help but think his portrayal of Kilgore was exactly what Coppola wanted. His character alone was one of the factors that caused this film to go from being one of presentation to representation, and that is basically summed up when he refers to the villagers as "f**king savages."

Overall, Francis Ford Coppola does a tremendous job giving a presentation and his representation of the Vietnam war, and a good deal of this is done through the cinematography.