Apocalypse now: redux [DVD]

A stunning vision of man’s heart of darkness, revealed through the particular madness of the Vietnam War. Lieutenant Willard receives orders to seek out the renegade Colonel Kurtz, who has disappeared into the depths of the jungle. Willard’s mission becomes an epic journey into his own soul and that of the mysterious Kurtz. The trails of making this film are well documented, particularly within “Hearts of darkness: a filmmaker’s apocalypse” (1991) - Coppola’s financial, casting and location woes complicated his desire to deliver an anti-war work that would find an audience. In 2000 he began working on restoring key scenes, deleted in 1979, identifying those that expounded upon his themes of military madness and moral degradation. New scenes include: Willard’s seduction by a widow after attending a dinner at the home of a French plantation owner, the sumptuousness of which speaks of yearning for an idealised past and reflects Willard’s retreat from the present; the Playboy bunnies become stranded and Willard’s crew offer them fuel in exchange for sex, compounding the sense of the military’s ethical deprivation; Kurtz extrapolates upon the insanity of war, a philosophical scene linked to the denouement. Coppola’s original work won numerous accolades, but many critics questioned the rationale behind “Redux” and theorised that it perhaps reflected his failure to produce engaging work throughout the 1990s.