Burnt out Captain Willard is sent into the jungle with orders to find and kill Colonel Kurtz who has set up his own army within the jungle. As he descends into the jungle he is slowly over taken by the jungles mesmerizing powers and the battles and insanity which surround him. His crew succumbs to drugs and is slowly killed off one by one. As Willard continues his journey he becomes more and more like the man he was sent to kill.This is such a great film, but was an unmitigated disaster to produce. Apparently Martin Sheen was so freaked out by this movie that he had a heart attack during filming. No wonder he's such a peacenik now (Team America, anyone?) Shooting was supposed to take six weeks but took sixteen months. Typhoons destroyed sets delaying production for four months. Marlon Brando showed up drunk and 40 kg overweight. He hadn't read Heart of Darkness (the Joseph Conrad novel the movie is loosely based on) or the script, and when he finally read the script, he refused to do it. He squabbled with Coppola over the lines and Coppola eventually got so fed up he turned the filming of Brando's scenes over to the assistant director. But the writing is excellent and the acting is superb, although some of it really isn't acting at all...Martin Sheen really was drunk in the opening scene and tried to attack Francis Ford Coppola, and I think Marlon Brando was really a lot like Kurtz, with his private island and all that.
Apocalypse Now was nominated for eight Oscars including Best Picture and won two. It also won the Palme D'Or...before the film was even finished.
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